In my first post in this series on using ASP.NET AJAX animations I described the basics of what an Animation was and the foundations behind using it. In my second post, I then started showing you how to go about using it (the basics). What remains are a few exceptional Animations that will be used in unusual circumstances (hence them being "exceptional") but which enable you with a great deal of power when you do decide to use them.

The Condition Animation

Why stop a good thing? So I'm going to continue using the (somewhat lame) example from my previous posts where I take a simple ASP.NET button control and do things to it using the Animation framework. In this example I leverage an animation called the Condition Animation; it gives you the ability to programmatically choose one of two (at most) animations to run depending on the boolean result of some script. For example, take the following Animation XML:

By clicking button Button1, the Condition Animation will be executed (if this block doesn't make sense, see my first post and read forward). Take note of the Condition Animation and it's child Animations. The first thing to take note of is the ConditionScript attribute on the Condition element; it's a simple statement: "false;". Although this is just a boolean result (false), it could be an entire JavaScript statement which evaluates to either true or false. For Condition Animations, if the resultant script statement evaluates to true, then the first child Animation is executed (in this sample, the FadeOut animation); if the script statement evalutes to false, then the second child Animation (which is the Color animation) would be executed.

Given that you now have programmatic control over what Animation is executed, you can take conditions on the page, evaluate them through the script, and then decide which Animation to run.

The Case Animation

Being limited to one of two Animations is, well limiting. In the event that you need to pick from a wider spectrum of Animations, but still do so using the result of a script statement, then you would leverage the Case Animation. Take the following XML Animation block:

The result of the SelectScript must be a 0-based index into the array of child Animations (0 is the first Animation or the "FadeOut" animation, 1 is the second animation or the "Color" animation in our example, and so forth). In my example I simply return "1" but, like the Condition Animation above, you could have an entire script statement as the SelectScript value. So long as your script statement evaluates to a valid index into the array of child Animations beneath your Case animation it will behave properly.

In the above example, the Color animation will be executed.

The Script Animation

To flat out execute script in the Animation you would leverage the Script Animation. Take the following example:

What we have here is a Sequence Animation housing a FadeOut and then a ScriptAction animation. Given what we already know about a Sequence animation, the child nodes (or child Animations) will be executed sequentially from top to bottom. Therefore, when Button1 is clicked, the Button will fade out over half a second and then a script modal window will pop up saying "All done". Of course, much more advanced script could be executed from the ScriptAction, but you get the basic idea.

What's Next?

Okay, next we are going to dive into the pipeline to see just how this magic is done. Stick around...