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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T07:01:19+00:00

I am looking for a mechanism to transform dataobjects into HTML. The elements in

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I am looking for a mechanism to transform dataobjects into HTML. The elements in the dataobject are of both, simple and complex types. I have tried playing with HtmlTextWriter for rendering but got stuck with complex types.

Mine is an ASP.Net website project. I have to avoid using server side controls (and therefore do away with built in binding capabilities) as the front end processing is done with the help of jQuery. I need to just churn out basic HTML for my dataobjects and the rest of enrichment (content arrangement and styling) will be done at the frontend.

I am looking for a simple solution (I found Spring.Net an overkill and overwhelming and NHAML also very confusing).

Further, my application is expected to grow over a period of time so I need to have some respect for performance. Therefore I am avoiding bringing XML/XSLT in the picture.

For eg. A Person object will be something like this:

String: Name
Int: Age
Complex Type: Address (includes Street, City, Zip)
Array of Type “Qualification” : Qualifications (includes Degree, Passing Year, Grades)

Desired output is: 

<p id="userName" class="userName">John</p>
<p id="age" class="age">35</p>
<div id="address" class="address">
    <p id="street" class="street">Express Highway</p>
    <p id="city" class="city">Mumbai</p>
    <p id="zip" class="zip">400101</p>
</div>
<div id="qualifications" class="qualifications">
    <div id="qualification1" class="qualification">
        <p id="degree1" class="degree">B.Sc.</p>
        <p id="year1" class="year">1990</p>
        <p id="grade1" class="grade">A</p>
    </div>
    <div id="qualification2" class="qualification">
        <p id="degree2" class="degree">M.Sc.</p>
        <p id="year2" class="year">1992</p>
        <p id="grade2" class="grade">A</p>
    </div>
</div>

A point to note here is that a mapper would be required to map the properties from the source dataobject, add some metadata to it (like HTML element attributes, etc) and then carry out the transformation.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m looking at it as a design problem and elaborate answer on much higher perspective that is design and not the code! The correct way to do this would be as following.

    • Person type is holding the information and it is data-centric so I recommend not to put any html-rendering responsibility into this class.

    • First you will need to have an abstract base-class for all your business/data objects. Let us assume [becuase you’ll need to have it] BusinessBase.

    • So you should start writing a server-control that derives from System.Web.UI.WebContorl. Expose a property that takes an object of type BusinessBase in it’s set accessor.

    • Now you need define some custom Attributes that is applied to properties of any sub-class of type BusinessBase. This attribute holds the renderring output information for that particular property of the business/data object. Decorate all properties which you want to be renderred in html.

    • Come back to your web-server-control and via use reflection to iterate through all properties [having your custom-attribute] of object which has been assigned to the server control property of type BusinessBase. Render the html as per the attribute.

    Now use this web-server-control and business object in your asp.net front-ends. Have fun.

    This is a high-level design. You’ll need to be more discrete and
    specific in your attribute as to what
    html rendering is generated for the
    business object.

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