Kazi Manzur Rashid's Blog

I am proud to announce the Beta release of AjaxDataControls. If you do not know about this project, please read my older post over here. The project ownership has been also changed, now it belongs to DotNetSlackers.com and released under the BSD license. There are a lot of enhancements and bug fixes have been made since the early prototype.

Enhancements

Styling: Previously the controls only had the css class name support. Currently it supports the server side Style Object.

DataList: Introducing the DataList control which includes:

• Templates: HeaderTemplate, FooterTemplate, ItemTemplate, AlternatingItemTemplate, SeparatorTemplate, SelectedItemTemplate, EditItemTemplate
• Styling: Separate Style Object for above mentioned templates.
• Events: Fires the same events as the original Asp.net version which includes ItemDataBound, ItemCreated, ItemCommand, EditCommand, UpdateCommand, DeleteCommand etc.
• Supports Repeat Direction, Repeat Count and exposes the Items as DataListItem object collection same as the original Asp.net version.

GridView: Extensive modification has been made to make the object model much more similar as the original Asp.net version.

• Different Column Type: Now it supports all kind of columns like Bound, Button, Command, Hyperlink, Template etc as the original Asp.net version. You can also create new column type easily and plug it in.
• Data Editing: Introducing Data Editing capabilities. By default it shows TextBox for Bound column and CheckBox for the CheckBox column. You can also show different controls by specifying it in the EditItemTemplate of the Template Column.
• Events: Fires the same events as the original Asp.net version which includes RowCreated, RowDataBound, RowCommand, SortCommand, EditCommand, UpdateCommand, DeleteCommand etc.
• Styling: Now supports Style object for Header, Footer, Row, AlternateRow, EditRow, SelectedRow etc.
• Exposes rows as GridViewRow object collection so that it can be easily iterated.
• The previous features like Drag and Drop of columns remains the same along with the others.

Repeater: Repeater now supports Command event as the original Asp.net version.

Pager: Style object introduced instead of different css class name.

General: All the controls are now derived from ScriptControl instead of Control. Debug and Release(Minified) version of the JS files have been added

Live example similar to Asp.net Data Access Tutorials which is hosted in DotNetSlackers (Coming Soon) demonstrate most of the features of these controls, we will be adding more examples soon.

Plans for the v1.0 final release

• Add complete Design Time support for all the controls.
• Provide Documentation for both server and client side API.
• Add Drag and Drop Support between the items of both DataList and Repeater.
• Introduce AutoFormating like the original Asp.net version.
• Release ASAP.

We decide to exclude the DetailsView, FormView and ObjectDataSource for the v1.0 as it might delay the final release.

Plans for the future release

• Include the above controls.
• Introduce more features based upon the community feedback.

Ownership changed

As mentioned in the above that the project now belongs to DotNetSlackers.com. The primary reason to give the ownership to DNS is to promote it higher and obviously DNS has been pioneered in delivering Asp.net Ajax materials in terms of great articles, news and application since it won the Atlas Mashup contest.The secondary reason to include few more members of DNS for contributing in this project.

Note About Ajax Control ToolKit

I have been asked quite a few times by my peers whether I am trying to compete with the Ajax Control ToolKit. Certainly not. The idea of developing these kind of controls strike me long ago when I was deep into the flake development for Pageflakes where the flakes were/still rendered in the client side by getting the data from web service call followed with extensive DHTML operations which includes html string concatation or generic DOM tree building. Certainly it is not a good choice in terms of separating data from UI rendering and at that time, I really missed those rich set of data controls of Asp.net in the client side. This is the primary difference between AjaxDataControls and ACT, the AjaxDataControls is developed only for Client Centric Development Model of Asp.net Ajax, on the other hand, the ACT is much more friendly with the Server Centric Development Model. And certainly I want to be in the driver seat in leading the development of these controls, that is why I did not try to submit it to ACT.

I hope these controls will be a great help for those who are planning/developing  highly ajaxed web applications.

You can download the beta with complete source and sample from the CodePlex. I will be showing the features/functionalities in detail in my up coming post. Stay tuned.