ASP.NET Dynamic Data

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)

Dynamic Data Preview 4 Released

Scott Hunter : Dynamic Data — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:29:39 GMT

Today we released the newest preview release of Dynamic Data. You can view the details and download this release from here: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=27026 . The preview releases of Dynamic Data contain much of the new feature sets that will be available when we release .NET 4. The cool thing is you can start using a lot of the new features against .NET 3.5 SP1 now using these releases. When we look back and see how people view Dynamic Data we regret that people immediately think of it as scaffolding of data. This is something that it does do, and I think it does a pretty good job at it. But Dynamic Data is a lot more then that, providing a new templating mechanism called Field Templates...(read more)

Dynamic Data in Regular Websites/Web Applications

Unhandled Exception : Dynamic Data — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:33:00 GMT

Today I'm excited to share that we've released DynamicData Preview 4 on codeplex. Check out the latest bits here . This release is particularly interesting not only for people that have been using Dynamic Data for a while now, but anyone that has an existing application today who wants to use some of the niceties Dynamic Data offers without having to take all the junk associated. Take a look at the SimpleDynamicData project for examples. Existing Sites Here are 2 good reasons to use Dynamic Data: Rich model validation Rich templating support via FieldTemplates If you've ever written a data driven app in webforms using our data controls, you would have realized that we are lacking a lot when it comes to validation. You can enable...(read more)

Customize Table Rows Filtering in Dynamic Data

Technical Notes : Dynamic Data — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:26:00 GMT

Introduction ASP.NET Dynamic Data enables you to use page markup to filter the table rows to display and provides the UI that enables the user to enter the values needed for custom row filtering. Dynamic Data will infer the filter template for creating the UI based on the column type. By default, Boolean and foreign-key columns are used for filtering. Custom filtering requires the following steps: Define table row filtering. Add a System.Web.DynamicData.DynamicFilter control and configure it for the desired filtering column. This allows for creating the UI that enables the user to perform table row filtering. Define data source filtering information. Add a System.Web.UI.WebControls.QueryExtender and configure it to reference the System.Web.DynamicData...(read more)