Disastrous ListMaker

Polished up the CSS somewhat on Wed. morning - now functionally better -- but the new desk edge is the most eye-drawing element, and it's useless. I think I'll re-photograph my notebook on a monochrome surface, then edit out the desk entirely and use soft shades of color ... ahhh.

Most of today was spent working on data persistence (this is the "disastrous" feeling). Basically, I don't know what the status of all my page elements are at any particular time. I miss Perl. Since my working data isn't too big, I've switched from Session[] to ViewState[], but I'm not liking how this seems to work with User Controls. I made a test program with one label, one button, and a user control with its own label and button, but it seemed like everything updated everything else, which didn't make sense ... (just like my real program) ... (and yes, I did turn off the Submit Behavior of the buttons).

I did get two problems fixed:

• Moving items from the search results to the to-be-saved list now seems to work great (I think). It was always appending, and not showing up right away. Now it works on the click, and also has the right items. The on the click is highlighted because nothing else seems to work on the first click (see below) ...
• You can Create new lists (this had broken) and give them titles, and it sort of checks to see if there's a duplicate title. This isn't working totally perfectly, though.

Here's what's still not working:

• deleting items from the to-be-saved list (I swear this was working before but blog says not). This has be baffled - it should be a simple onclick event, but it's not firing.
• there are several places where the action has taken place (save list, view list to edit) but it's not showing up on the screen on the first click. It takes a second click.
• I'm not sure that saving edited lists and saving newly created lists is really working - it looks like it is working, but I need to check the data.

The solutions to the above that I've thought of so far:

• Getting rid of the 'user control' If I do this, it would be in the hopes of removing a layer of confusion from the ViewState. But I was so proud that I got it working, with delegates and whatnot. But, it's not really necessary.
• Starting from scratch (ha, ha, ... no wait maybe that's a good idea...)
• Try to learn more about View State from my test program and the books and making the current version work (yccchhhh) - the trick is how it works with user controls, though. I think I get it without the user control -Well, here's how it looks as of now... see the Edge?