ASP.NET Dynamic Data

Automatically prepopulate fields for Insert in .NET 4

Scott Hunter : Dynamic Data — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:35:00 GMT

We introduced a lot of little data enhancements in .NET 4 that you may not have heard about. One of these is a mechanism for setting the default value of fields in a data control when you want to do an Insert. In our controls today you would probably do something painful: - Handle the ItemCreated event and inside the event you can call FindControl and find the control for each column manually and set the value on the control using whatever property it supports to set its control. - Handle the Inserting event on the data source control (if you are using one) and check to see if fields have values and if not set the default. This is problematic because this happens after the user has pressed Insert so they do not see the default value until AFTER...(read more)

Building custom LINQ expressions made easy with DynamicQueryable.

Marcin On ASP.NET : ASP.NET Dynamic Data — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:01:00 GMT

A colleague of mine recently called me out on the fact that I haven't blogged in … oh about a year and a half . Well it’s 2010 now and resolution season is in full swing so here’s my attempt at getting back on the ball (no promises though). In a recent post Scott Hanselman described writing custom filters for ASP.NET Dynamic Data . Scott provides a nice overview of the Dynamic Data architecture and then gets his hands dirty with some custom filters using the advanced capabilities available in Dynamic Data Futures . However, he soon realizes that writing custom late-bound LINQ expressions is definitely not a trifle. I started thinking about how this experience could be improved and so started writing some code. Things were going great and...(read more)

Peter Blum’s new blog and his cool new data source controls

Angle Bracket Percent : Dynamic Data — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:19:54 GMT

Peter Blum has been well known is the ASP.NET world for many years for writing a whole suite of powerful controls, which you can read all about on his site . One thing that was missing on Peter’s resume is that he never had a blog. Well he started one earlier this month, and is making up for the lost time in a big way, with already 11 posts! And we’re not talking about small posts that just point to other people’s stuff (unlike this post I suppose!), but real with useful meaty content. Make sure you check out his blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/peterblum/ . I hope he keeps the good stuff coming! In particular, Peter has been working hard on some interesting data source controls that work with Visual Studio 2010. ...(read more)

ASP.NET Dynamic Data Overview

Technical Notes : Dynamic Data — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:01:00 GMT

This post is a preview of the up-coming documentation on MSDN. The links in this post will point to the new topics when available. Please, send us your feedback. ASP.NET Dynamic Data lets you create extensible data-driven Web applications by inferring at runtime the appearance and behavior of data entities from the database schema and deriving UI behavior from it. Dynamic Data supports scaffolding, which is a way to automatically generate Web pages for each table in the database. Scaffolding lets you create a functional Web site for viewing and editing data based on the schema of the data. You can easily customize scaffolding elements or create new ones to override the default behavior. You can also enable dynamic behavior in existing or new...(read more)

Using an Associated Metadata Class outside Dynamic Data

Angle Bracket Percent : Dynamic Data — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:31:00 GMT

A while back, I blogged about how ASP.NET Dynamic Data apps can uses an Associated Metadata class (aka a ‘buddy’ class) to add metadata attributed to properties defined in a generated class. It’s a mostly ugly thing that was made necessary by limitations of the C# and VB.NET languages: they don’t let you add attributes to properties defined in another partial class. What I didn’t mention there is that this ‘buddy’ class mechanism is actually not specific to Dynamic Data apps, and can in fact be used anywhere. Since I’ve recently heard of several cases of users trying to do something similar, I’ll describe how it’s done. If you’re familiar with TypeDescriptionProviders (which have been around since ancient times), this will look very trivial...(read more)

ASP.NET Dynamic Data Breakdown

Lost In Tangent » ASP.NET Dynamic Data — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:22:16 GMT

You've probably heard about the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature that is a part of the recently released ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP, but maybe you've been scratching your head trying to figure out what exactly it offers you. Well, Scott Hunter, a PM of the Dynamic Data team just published ... Read More......(read more)

Dynamic Data: Come For The Scaffolding, Stay For Everything Else

Lost In Tangent » ASP.NET Dynamic Data — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:22:15 GMT

ASP.NET Dynamic Data has gotten a bad reputation for being nothing more than a new web application type that allows you to point at a database and get a fully generated site, complete with pages for working with the data in your database (CRUD operations). While that perception does hold ... Read More......(read more)

Dynamic Data: Kickin’ It Old School

Lost In Tangent » ASP.NET Dynamic Data — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:22:13 GMT

There have already been articles written illustrating how to leverage Dynamic Data within an existing web application, but instead of just outlining the steps required to do so, I'd like to give a little contextual explanation as to why you might want to do that, and what benefits may exist. ... Read More......(read more)

Dynamic Data: Models, MetaModels And Everything In Between

Lost In Tangent » ASP.NET Dynamic Data — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:22:12 GMT

In the previous article, I mentioned that the existing data controls in WebForms aren't very smart as regards to your data, but in all fairness, it isn't really their fault. How is a GridView supposed to know that a property is required? How can a FormView know that a specific ... Read More......(read more)

Dynamic Data: The Little MetaModel That Could

Lost In Tangent » ASP.NET Dynamic Data — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:22:11 GMT

When a MetaModel is initialized from a data source (via its respective provider), what additional information is determined in the process? The MetaModel itself contains a couple of useful instance properties and methods (more of which we'll examine later), but for the purpose of this article, we only care about ... Read More......(read more)

Dynamic Data: Annotating Your Data-Driven World

Lost In Tangent » ASP.NET Dynamic Data — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:22:09 GMT

In the last article we discussed how a MetaModel could derive some of its metadata content from its respective provider's underlying data model (i.e. an EDM), but also mentioned that there is a lot of valuable information that can't necessarily be deduced from every data model type. Because a data ... Read More......(read more)

Dynamic Data: Associated Types And The Models They Love

Lost In Tangent » ASP.NET Dynamic Data — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:22:08 GMT

In the last article we introduced the ContextConfiguration class and its MetadataProviderFactory property. We also saw that if a provider factory isn't explicitly set then an instance of the AssociatedMetadataTypeTypeDescriptorProvider class will be used. What we didn't discuss is what an "associated metadata type" is, and why we need a ... Read More......(read more)

Dynamic Data: Putting A New Dress On An Old Model

Lost In Tangent » ASP.NET Dynamic Data — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:22:06 GMT

Now that we've spent the last five articles spelunking into the glorious underbelly of the Dynamic Data runtime, and seeing what it offers, we need to begin investigating how to allow a MetaModel to "light up" our UI. Everything that we've seen up to this point is completely agnostic to ... Read More......(read more)

Setting font attributes with UIHint in your Entity Partial Class

Ricka on MVC & Dynamic Data : Dynamic Data — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:41:00 GMT

I've written a simple Field Template ( RedBold.ascx ) that reads most font attributes and applies them to your field values. The new entity templates make it easy to apply font attributes to the field labels. The image below shows several font attributes...( read more ) Read More......(read more)

Walkthrough: Filtering Table Rows in Dynamic Data

Technical Notes : Dynamic Data — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:03:00 GMT

Introduction This walkthrough shows how to use the Dynamic Data filter templates to create the UI that enables you to choose a column value for selecting (filtering) table rows to display. By default, Dynamic Data includes templates that let you specify filtering for Boolean column values and for foreign-key column values. In this walkthrough you will build an application that displays filtered rows from tables contained by the AdventureWorksLT sample database, in the following ways: Filter table rows using a foreign key. You will create the page markup to let Dynamic Data generate the UI and perform row filtering in the Products table by using the foreign-key column values from the ProductCategories table. You use this approach when you want...(read more)