An ASP.NET button click event is not firing

Question

I have a button within a div which is hidden by default as it is used as a modal popup by jQuery UI.

The click event handler for this button never gets called, yet if I copy the button code outside of this hidden div then it works correctly. How do I get around this problem?

This is the code I have so far:

<div id="dialog" title="Notify Users">
    <div style="width:100%; height:500px; overflow:auto;">
       <asp:Repeater runat="server"  ID="rptNotify">
          <HeaderTemplate>
             <table>
          </HeaderTemplate>
          <ItemTemplate>
             <tr>
                <td>
                   <asp:CheckBox ID="chkUser" runat="server" Checked='<%# Eval("Checked") %>' />
                </td>
                <td>
                   <asp:Label ID="lblUser" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("FullName") %>'/>
                </td>
             </tr>
          </ItemTemplate>
          <FooterTemplate>
             </table>
          </FooterTemplate>
       </asp:Repeater>
    </div>
    <asp:Button ID="btnSaveNotifications" runat="server" Text="Save" OnClick="btnSaveNotifications_Click" />
 </div>

The code to show /hide this div is:

<script>
     // Increase the default animation speed to exaggerate the effect
     $.fx.speeds._default = 1000;

     $(function () {
        $("#dialog").dialog({
           autoOpen: false,
           show: "blind",
           hide: "explode"
        });

        $("#opener").click(function () {
           $("#dialog").dialog("open");
           return false;
        });
     });
</script>

Answer 1

The problem here is that jQuery-UI creates the dialog outside of the <form> element, so clicking on it never submits the form.

To get around this, rather than create a click event manually, you can just move the dialog <div> back into the form. I did a quick search and the answer to this question already covers the issue.

So you just need to make this change:

<script>
     // increase the default animation speed to exaggerate the effect
     $.fx.speeds._default = 1000;

     $(function () {
        var dialog = $("#dialog").dialog({
                        autoOpen: false,
                        show: "blind",
                        hide: "explode"
                     });

        // Move the dialog back into the <form> element
        dialog.parent().appendTo(jQuery("form:first"));

        $("#opener").click(function () {
           $("#dialog").dialog("open");
           return false;
        });
     });
</script>

Answer 2

A turnaround will be to change your button event to a client event, then trigger the server side event from client side.

See Stack Overflow question How to fire a button click event from JavaScript in ASP.NET .

Answer 3

Beware that this has ramifications when using a iFrame in your dialog. Moving a div with a iFrame in it causes that iFrame to post twice or more. If you have implemented this, I would check to see if this is true in your case. I have posted a work-around that I found here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24663205/3334255