What to do when "Load on demand" returns nothing

[Thierry Baertschiger]

Hello. 

I need some suggestions/ideas...

I use a RadComboBox with "EnableLoadOnDemand=true" and a web service. With these settings I cannot change the value of the property "AllowCustomText": it cannot be different from true as explained here:  http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-ajax/cannot-disable-allowcustomtext-load-on-demand.html.

The problem that I have is that the combo box displays a closed list, which means that it should not allow the user to select a value which is not in that list. But with the "AllowCustomText = true", nothing prevents the user from doing this. 

What can I do to tell the user that he/she has entered something not allowed ? Has anybody some ideas to do something nice in that case ?

I like what is done here http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/combobox/examples/functionality/autocompleteclientside/defaultcs.aspx when "AllowCustomText = false" : the user cannot enter letters when there is no match in the combo box. 

Note that I have tried what is proposed in the above link but this is not OK since there is no call to the web server when the user enter some text in the combo box. 

Thierry

[Cori]

Hello Thierry,

My suggestion would be handle the OnClientKeyPressing event and in there check if what they typed exists in the results returned from the LoadOnDemand request. If no results were returned, you can cancel the key press and then display an alert telling them no items exist or something like that. Like so:

function OnClientKeyPressing(sender, args){
     var textTyped = sender.get_text();
     if(sender.get_items().length == 0){
         alert("No Items Exist!");
         args.set_cancel(true);
     }
}

I hope that helps.