View Source Trick for Pages with Partial Rendering

Many people when developing want to look at the browser’s View Source to make sure that things are being outputted correctly or to see where in the DOM certain things are showing up. However, if you are using the Ajax concept of partial rendering (usually via UpdatePanels), what you get is the initial state of the page when it was first loaded before any partial page updates, not the state of the page as it is currently.

To see the “current” source for the page, simply paste the following code into your browser’s location bar. It’s a little long, but it covers most browsers.

javascript:if (typeof(window.document.body.outerHTML) != 'undefined'){'<xmp>'+window.document.body.outerHTML+'</xmp>'} else if (typeof(document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML) != 'undefined'){ '<xmp>'+document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML+'</xmp>'} else if (typeof(window.document.documentElement.outerHTML) != 'undefined'){ '<xmp>'+window.document.documentElement.outerHTML+'</xmp>'} else { alert('Your browser does not support this.') }