That's because the documentation sucks!


That, and because Anthem is not an API like jQuery.



Anthem tries to be drop-in replacements for the ASP.NET controls. I think it does that pretty well, but it suffers from a poor customization story (inherited from the poor customization story in the standard controls).



Here's what Anthem wants to be:



1. Take a WebForms page that is working well…



<asp:GridView id="grid" runat="server">blah blah</asp:GridView>

<asp:Button id="button" runat="server">blah blah</asp:Button>



2. Change "asp" to "anthem" and you have Ajax!




<anthem:GridView id="grid" runat="server">blah blah</anthem:GridView>

<anthem:Button id="button" runat="server">blah blah</anthem:Button>



That's it. That's all Anthem wants or tries to be. It will never do anything more. If this is what you need, then Anthem is a much better solution than MS Ajax, which tries to be this (but kind of fails because it does not support all the controls) and a little bit more (but not enough to be really useful).



If you want to add drag-and-drop panels, or lazy loading, etc., then you have to use something additional.



All of my BVC5 use a combination of Anthem and YUI. I like the simplicity of "ajaxifying" the controls (it literally takes 2 seconds) combined with the shiny stuff that I get from YUI.

My product pages were switched to Telerik's AJAX. It seems a bit limited and specific, but it apparently can be done.

I do like the drag and drop sorting that I referenced at the beginning of this thread, but I'd be happy if I could just re-number the product order ala netflix queue

OK...that's it for me on this issue.

If you install my Shipping Rate Rule Providers or USPS Shipping (alpha/beta), you will see several examples of how I combine Anthem with YUI.


The providers use several Anthem.GridView controls to display the rules, YUI Dialog (import/export) and YUI Panel (context help). Probably more, but those are what I remember.



USPS Shipping again uses Anthem.GridView and Anthem.MultiView with YUI ToolTips (inside the GridView so the YUI ToolTip is updated each time the GridView is paged, etc), YUI Panel (callback busy, help), and some more that I forget. All the styling is YUI CSS, including Reset to set everything back to a base line, YUI CSS Grids to establish the layout, and several of the control specific SAM styles to give everything a consistent look.



In a few cases, I created my own derivatives of Anthem controls that spit out YUI compatible HTML (mostly the right CSS classes to work with YUI CSS).