What's the best practice element to use when allowing selection in C# website?

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To display text where each word is selectable. Which Html element is recommended to surround each word. I would like it to be visible to the user and underline when selected.

What I have tried:

This doesn't didn't reference to my call of the C# public void.

<span id="1" onclick="my_function()"> word here </span>

I would like the onclick to work, but still look like regular text.

<asp:linkbutton runat="server" OnClick="my_function"> word here </asp:linkbutton>

Looking for something like...

<asp:span id="1" onclick="my_c#_function"> word here </asp:span>

Posted 19-Oct-21 5:01am

Chana Gross

Updated 19-Oct-21 11:07am

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DerekT-P · Answer 1 · 2021-10-19T11:07:00

I don't know about "best practice" in this use case; however - depending on the number of words involved - you may find the overheads of setting up many separate controls are excessive... if only in terms of page size.

I'd probably approach this by wrapping each word in a simple tag, no need for any additional attributes. On page load, run a simple script (using JQuery in this example)

JavaScript

$('#parentelement span').click(function() {
    $('#hiddenfield').val($(this).text());
    $('#hiddenbutton').click();
});

where #hiddenfield is just that, and #hiddenbutton is a standard button but styled to be display:none. Your server event simply checks the value passed back in the hidden field to identify which word has been clicked. Use CSS to style each span on mouseover / mousedown.

CSS

#parentelement span:hover {
   text-decoration:underline;
}