TextChanged event of TextBox not raised by the Internet Explorer AutoComplete feature

As noted in this msdn article, The TextChanged event of a TextBox control may not fire if the AutoComplete feature is enabled in Internet Explorer. And it appears to be “by design” – I hate that.

Fortunately, it is pretty easy to add some JavaScript to make the ‘right thing’ happen.

All you need to do is raise the onchange event at the appropriate time. For me that is when the TextBox loses focus. As I am doing this from code behind (as usual) I am registering a client script, then when I add the TextBox I set its onblur attribute accordingly:

Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock(typeof(FormPage), "RaiseOnChange", "function RaiseOnChange(ctrl){ctrl.fireEvent('onchange');}", true);

tb.Attributes[HtmlAttributes.OnBlur] = string.Format("RaiseOnChange({0})", tb.UniqueID);

The server side TextChanged event only gets raised if the TextBox.Value has really changed. I needed to do this because I am using the TextChanged event of some TextBox controls to trigger an asyncpostback to update an UpdatePanel. The code that sets the content of the UpdatePanel is in the server side TextChanged handler.