CodeSOD: Unable to Focus

We've talked about Microsoft's WebForms in the past. Having used it extensively in the era, it was a weird mismatch, an attempt to get Visual Basic-style GUI designer tools attached to web applications, where button presses on the client side web page were exposed as events on the server side.

It also meant that you could manipulate the GUI objects on the server side, and the rendered HTML would represent that. So as part of processing a request, you might manipulate one of these "server side" controls. So, if you wanted to ensure that the search field had focus when the page loaded, you could simply invoke txtSearch.Focus() as part of handling the request.

Since you may still need to do something on the client side at page load, like maybe register run some jQuery calls to turn a text box into a fancy date picker wideget, it also offered a ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript. This executes some JavaScript when the page loads.

If all of this sounds bad, and like it's the real WTF, you're absolutely right. But even in this terrible world, you could still make things worse.

Ino sends this:

        private void SetFocus()
        {
            ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(hiddenDummy, hiddenDummy.GetType(), "focus", 
            "document.getElementById('" + txtSearch.ClientID + "').focus();", true);
            ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(hiddenDummy, hiddenDummy.GetType(), "focus2", 
            "document.getElementById('" + txtSearch.ClientID + "').focus();", true);
            ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(hiddenDummy, hiddenDummy.GetType(), "focus3", 
            "document.getElementById('" + txtSearch.ClientID + "').focus();", true);
            ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(hiddenDummy, hiddenDummy.GetType(), "focus4", 
            "document.getElementById('" + txtSearch.ClientID + 
                "').value = document.getElementById('" + txtSearch.ClientID + "').value;", true);
            ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(hiddenDummy, hiddenDummy.GetType(), "focus5", 
            "document.getElementById('" + txtSearch.ClientID + 
                "').value = document.getElementById('" + txtSearch.ClientID + "').value;", true);
        }

So, instead of using the server-side rendering to focus the text box, we'll use a client side script. We attach that script to hiddenDummy, which is a hidden input field in this example which exists only because you need to supply a control that "owns" the <script> tag that's about to be injected, and then it injects some utter nonsense. Three times, it does a document.getElementById(…).focus() to move focus, and then two times it sets the element's value equal to the element's value.

This has the air of generated code gone wrong, but it still leaves us with weird questions: who would generate this? Why? Even if it were just one instance of calling focus on the client side, it still makes no sense to do it that way. And what process would generate code that sets an element's value to itself?

In the end, we just have questions and no answers. There's a WTF surrounding this, but we can only see the effects.

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This post originally appeared on The Daily WTF.