I believe this is a fundamental question regarding asp.net’s way of manipulating database items. Basically the server side way of manipulating database items (using ListView or similar) is outdated due to the post back model is outdated compared to AJAX. Let’s say you have forward and backward buttons on the gallery to update images from the database. You need to postback in order to update page. Clearly this could use an ajaxfied approach. I have been thinking about this long and hard and have observed most websites that uses ListView or GridView or whatever do not ajaxfy the process, probably due to the difficulty of this problem. For those that ajaxfy the page, they use the UpdatePanel, which is only “pseudo-ajax”.
I would like to know do other programmers have a FULLY ajaxfied way of updating a page of a photo gallery, retrieved from database by ListView? As I said I have been thinking about this long and hard and I think there might be two approaches: First, use ListView to first populate photo gallery. On pressing forward or backword button, use jQuery’s ajax method to connect to an .ashx page and use .ashx page to retrieve data items and then use jQuery to update the photo gallery at the client side.
The second way I forsee would be abandoning the ListView altogether and use a for loop in .ashx to populate gallery from the beginning. This approach unifies the initial data retrieval method and the “postback” data retrieval method, which could mean less code needed, since you do not need the aspx page at all.
My question is, what is the realistic way to fully ajaxfy the page mentioned above?
So far the best way I have found would be to use jQuery AJAX to update whatever changes, although it can be much more time consuming than posting back to server and update from there