ASP.NET “Mini” Master/Detail Pattern

ASP.NET “Mini” Master/Detail Pattern

In ASP.NET 2.0 the master/detail pattern has undergone massive improvements, however when working with ASP.NET 1.1 and Visual Studio .NET 2003/2002 it is a much more manual process. There are hundreds of articles regarding this subject however the most common usage is with large amounts of data; meaning long lists, with subsets of data that can fill large forms.

Sometimes the amount of data is smaller and you need to develop a much more compact version of this pattern, providing your users with a quick and easy lookup for extra information regarding your entity, whatever it may be.

In this tutorial we’ll look at a compact or “mini” version of the master/detail pattern which uses a very small list of data presented in a DataGrid component, and selecting a row in the DataGrid will display a minimal amount of extra information on another details form contained in the same page.

In addition to the master/detail pattern we’ll also implement a few tips & tricks with the DataGrid component to give us a more usable control. Below is a list of other aspects covered in this tutorial:

• Bound column concatenation: Binding more than one column in the data source to a
  single column on the DataGrid component without using code-behind
• Primary Key lookup: Binding the primary key to a hidden field on the DataGrid for easy seeking of rows on selection
• Select anywhere feature: Allowing the user to click on any cell on the DataGrid to invoke the SelectedIndexChanged event
• Manual DataSet object construction: How to create a DataSet through code including a primary key column
• Enable smart navigation to minimize page refresh visually

Although this tutorial is designed to be used in a more compact fashion the pattern itself can easily be migrated to larger implementations with larger volumes of data. This tutorial is not based on the new ASP.NET 2.0 implementation wizards for building master/detail pages; it is designed for ASP.NET 1.1.

Free, Pure ASP Upload 3 - Upload Multiple Files at Once

Today we'll show you how to you can enable your users to upload multiple files at once with Pure ASP Upload and the Flash Based Upload Control. [view]

Export Calendar Items to Outlook 2K3

Export Calendar Items to Outlook 2K3

One of the advantages to working with Microsoft development platforms is that there are often convenient integration tools available to leverage the functionality of other advanced Microsoft applications. The Microsoft Office suite of products is a widely known and used bundle of software that can give you access to advanced features without doing a ton of extra coding.

One of the products in this suite is Outlook 2003. Known of course as mainly an email reader it also has a myriad of features and support for tasks, calendars, notes, contacts, meetings and more. When developing your own applications it is sometimes advantageous to take advantage of these features instead of trying to develop them yourself.

Working With Mobile ASP.NET Apps – Part 2

In part 1 of this tutorial we reviewed some basic concepts behind mobile development, we created a new mobile web application project and linked to a sample database and reviewed some of the principals behind mobile web forms.

In this second and final part of the series we’ll continue building upon our sample application and put an ObjectList control into practice using our sample data source.

We’ll also look at some of the mysteries behind this control that should help you avoid a lot of R&D and trial and error programming when it comes to rendering tabular data for mobile devices.

ObjectList Confusion

In part 1 we reviewed the properties list of the ObjectList control and found that there were a plethora of properties available to use, yet finding complete documentation on the items is sometimes difficult. Even with the MSDN library itself the examples and explanations sometimes provide little or no help.

To compound the problem, online support and newsgroup discussions on the subject are somewhat scarce. It seems that mobile development is a bit of a hidden art, and you often have no choice but to simply figure things out on your own.

In this section we’ll cover some of the peculiarities of the ObjectList control that should help you avoid a lot of the common exceptions and errors encountered.

Working With Mobile ASP.NET Apps – Part 1

In the world of ASP.NET there’s a whole other breed of application that few developers ever have the need to work with: Mobile Web Applications. These are applications that are designed to run on mobile devices which can be anything from a pocket PC, to a BlackBerry, to a cell phone.

This realm of development is a very confusing one, due to the volume of disparate devices and their methods of implementation and visual capabilities. Often developers are left to focus on one particular style of device in order to bring out the best capabilities instead of taking a more generic one-size-fits-all implementation.

Because mobile development is so radically different in presentation the .NET framework has a dedicated set of assemblies for it residing in the System.Web.Mobile namespace. In this namespace is a dedicated set of interface components designed specifically to run on mobile devices, most of which duplicate the common components in regular web forms development such as labels, buttons, textboxes and so forth.

Although these components are fundamentally similar some of the principles behind mobile development are hidden and convoluted and developers are left spending many hours of trial and error getting certain basic features to work.

The goal of this two part tutorial is to review some of the not so obvious aspects of mobile development that often leave developers scratching theirs when finding solutions. We’ll implement a basic demonstration application that will take some of the common features performed in regular web development and see how they are implemented in a mobile development environment.

In part one we’ll setup a new mobile web application and connect it to a sample database so we have some data to work with and we’ll also review the DataGrid’s cousin in mobile development: The object list control. We’ll review some theory behind this control and some of its more confusing implementation designs and how best to use it and how not to use it.

In part two we’ll continue building on our demonstration application and implement a mobile form which uses the object list control and sub forms, and see how DataGrid style pages are developed in a mobile environment.