Question

Due to a lack of response to my original question, probably due to poor wording on my part. Since then, I have thought about my original question and decided to reword it, hopefully for the better! 🙂

We create custom business software for our customers, and quite often they want attachments to be added to certain business entities. For example, they want to attach a Word document to a customer, or an image to a job. I’m curious as to how other are handling the following:

• How the user attaches documents? Single attachment? Batch attachment?
• How you display the attached documents? Simple list? Detailed list?
• And the killer question, how the user then edits attached documents? Is this even possible in a web environment? Granted the user can just view the attachment.
• Is there a good control library to help manage this process?

Our current development environment is ASP.NET and C#, but I don’t think this is a pretty agnostic question when it comes to development tools, save for the fact I need to work in a web environment.

It seems we always run into problems with the customer and working with attachments in a web environment so I am looking for some successes that other programmers have had with their user base on how best to interact with attachments.

Answer 1

• Start with one file upload control (‘Browse button’), and use JavaScript to dynamically add more upload controls if they want to attach multiple files in a single batch.
• Display them in a simple list format (Filename, type, size, date), but provide full details somewhere else if they want them.
• If they want to edit the files, they have to download them, then re-upload them. Hence, you need a way that they can say ‘this attachment overrides that old attachment’.
• I’m not familiar with C# and ASP.NET, so I can’t recommend any libraries that will help.