Dynamic Form Display with RadioButtonList

When developing user interfaces it’s often key to remember all the tricks and tools available to you so that you may combine them in creative ways in order to implement more advanced features. Given the sometimes limiting postback mechanism it’s important to make every refresh count, and to provide a unique experience by taking advantage of the postback server processing.

There are 2 particular server components that work together quite nicely to form a creative user interface experience: The RadioButtonList and the floating DIV tag. When combining these components we can create an almost wizard-like interface using some advanced GUI tricks in tandem with the postback events.

In this tutorial we will build an ASP.NET application with 2 dynamic pseudo “forms”, and we will then implement a RadioButtonList to simply flip between the 2 forms dynamically on the page. Although the forms will appear as layered on top of each other we’ll see how we can design the forms side-by-side in the design environment and then layer them together in server code.

By implementing AutoPostBack on the RadioButtonList we’ll show how we can create post backs and dynamically display the selected form to the user, creating a dynamic space in a small amount of screen space allowing for multiple entry screens without using the entire width and height of the page.

Import/Export Outlook Contacts in ASP.NET

Import/Export Outlook Contacts in ASP.NET

Integration in applications is quite often a requirement when building larger scale applications. With customers and clients using such a variety of productivity applications there is quite often a need to make use of these other applications within your own, which can cause a headache due to the complexity involved.

One of the more popular productivity suites in use is Microsoft Office. Customers more often than not will want a way to merge their productivity between applications such as Outlook, Word and Excel within your application, which is definitely no easy task.

Dreamweaver ASP.NET User Management Systems: Creating Custom Encrypted Authentication Tickets

In the other tutorials in this series we explored the ASP.NET security model and utilizing it to build rich featured User Management Systems using Dreamweaver. We learned how to use the web.config file to configure security on ASP.NET web application. We learned how to authenticate a user using Forms Authentication method. We learned how to create cookie to hold a user’s role and how to create a custom Generic Identity object to maintain the user’s role authorization from one request to another. Finally we learned how use the role information and Generic Identity object to programmatically control our user experience. In this final tutorial in the series, we will build upon prior discussions as we take over the Forms Authentication Ticket creation process to create our own custom authentication ticket and encrypt it using the ASP.NET FormsAuthentication class. That said, this tutorial stands on it’s own in the presentation of the topics covered.

Before you get too involved, let’s see if you’re ready. This tutorial makes assumptions about your skill level--that is, this tutorial is intended for intermediate users. If you’ve never configured a new site in Dreamweaver, never configured a database connection string, or never used the Dreamweaver database connectivity tools, this tutorial is probably not for you as you’ll need to be familiar with these concepts and techniques. If you have done these things but have very little or no experience hand coding, writing SQL statements, using the Dreamweaver advanced Dataset Dialog, don’t worry we’re doing this together and I’ll do my part to bring you along.  

Using the ASP.NET Calendar Control

When building web applications, at some point during your requirements documentation you’ll probably come across the need for users to enter dates onto a form. Working with dates may seem like a simple task but it can quite easily become very complicated.

The reason date entry becomes complex is because of the validation that needs to be performed. In older languages this validation was provided by the developer. They had to consider all kinds of conditional checks, such as the number of days in the selected month, whether the selected February was in a leap year, as well as all the rules regarding leap years.

Fortunately, ASP.NET has made this style of date programming a thing of the past. The .NET framework has a built-in calendar component which provides all the basic functionality for most development scenarios and it comes pre-programmed with all of the aforementioned validation already in place.

By using this component the developer can focus on other aspects such as presentation and usability functionality instead of worrying about whether February 2028 has 28 or 29 days.

In this tutorial we’ll look at some of the basic functionality provided by the ASP.NET Calendar component and two basic examples of common usage of this component in web applications. We’ll also look at some of the basic formatting methods provided by the Date class.