A simple progress bar web user control

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Introduction

In a recent project, I needed a way to show progress to a user in a series of manually progressed web pages. If they were on page 10 of 20 pages, I wanted them to be able to clearly see that they were half way done.

My ideal solution would be a quick, simple, lightweight progress bar. I toyed with complex ideas like dynamically creating images to represent the current state, but in the end another programmer showed me a much simpler way, by using an HTML table. I took that idea, and extended it by creating a web user control that I could use (and re-use) in my ASP.NET application.

Using the code

I created a user control with a single label control called lblProgress. I then added a public SetProgress method to allow the parent web form to set the progress.

Public Sub SetProgress(ByVal current As Integer, ByVal max As Integer)
    Dim percent As String = Double.Parse(current * 100 / max).ToString("0")

    If Not percent.Equals("0") And Not percent.Equals("100") Then
        lblProgress.Text = percent + "% complete (" + _
                current.ToString() + " of " + max.ToString() + ")"

    lblProgress.Text = lblProgress.Text & _
        "<TABLE cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 border=1 width=200 ID="Table1"_
        ><TR><TD bgcolor=#000066 width=" + _
        percent.ToString() + _
        "%> </TD><TD bgcolor=#FFF7CE> _
        </TD></TR></TABLE>"
    End If
End Sub

Later on, I added a check to prevent the progress bar from displaying unless it reached a threshold (25% in my case). The idea was that we did not want to discourage the user by showing them that they were only 5% done. Rather, we would start showing the progress bar once they had reached some predetermined point, at which time it would become more of an encouragement.

If Integer.Parse(percent) < 25 Then
    'only start showing at 25%
    lblProgress.Visible = False
Else
    lblProgress.Visible = True
End If

Points of interest

Obviously this is a very simple technique, but it saved me from myself - I could have spent many hours writing a user control that dynamically generated an image, and obtained something only marginally better looking than this.

History

• First upload: 9/9/2003.