ASP.NET Dynamic Data: Customize a template field

Following my first post on ASP.NET Dynamic Data, I want to show you that you can customize existing fields used by Dynamic Data very easily.

With the Northwind db, here is the generated edit screen for the Employees table:

 

We could make this default user experience a lot better by changing the date input, why not add some AJAX here ?

Template fields used by Dynamic Data are stored in DynamicData/FieldTemplates folder as simple user controls:

You can see that there is a DateTime_Edit.ascx control, open it and add an Image for the calendar icon and a CalendarExtender from the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="ajax" %>
<asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" CssClass="droplist" Text='<%# FieldValueEditString %>' Columns="20" /> 
<asp:Image ID="imgCalendar" runat="server" ImageUrl="~/DynamicData/Content/Images/calendar.png" />
<ajax:CalendarExtender runat="server" TargetControlID="TextBox1" PopupButtonID="imgCalendar" />


Now you get:

The calendar looks weird due to some CSS applied to the DetailsView. A quick workaround is to remove the CssClass attribute from the DetailsView1 control in DynamicData/PageTemplates/Edit.aspx :

Doing that (or fixing the CSS in Site.css file) will make the calendar looks good:

Note that the field is still fully functional without adding code, in a next post I will show how to create a new template field.

Source code:

 

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1 Comment

  • Hi Laurent,

    I followed your post and have the calendar working but when I removed the cssclass it still didn't fix the problem with how it looked. I tried adding a new cssclass to the details view but that didn't work either. Would you be able to just give me a quick run down of how to do it so I can check if I did it correctly?

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