Question

I am working on a project involves exposing many data entities (more than 200) through an ASP.NET MVC application.
I do not want to write views for every entity mode and I am wondering if there is a way of having one generic view to display different models (for example, a view which reads the model properties(metadata) and generates a HTML table to display a list of entities.

Answer 1

If you only need to display, you can write your own generic renderer in few minutes using reflection. Or, you can use ModelVisualizer from MvcContrib, or Grid from MvcContrib which can do Html.Grid(Model).AutoGenerateColumns() to automatically show properties as columns. It doesn’t support DataAnnotations or attributes, but you can write your own extension method that will use reflection to generate Grid’s columns based on some attributes. And you can quickly turn this grid into jqGrid using jqGrid’s tableToGrid() method.

If you need input support, there’re several choices:

1. MvcContrib’s InputBuilder (here you can see a simple example on how it’s done with reflection)
2. MVC v2 InputFor(), I think it supports rendering several properties, but I’m not sure.
3. My solution does read metadata (attributes) from view models and generates jqGrid formatting and editing options automatically.

There should be commercial tools, too.