Question

I have a service request form. A series of textboxes (single and multi line), radiobuttons, checkboxes and dropdowns are used to gather information about the request. On submit a database record is created, via Entity Framework, and the form redirects to a summary page that needs to display the request. This same summary page will be used for request approvers to view and possibly edit parts of the request (depending on their role). I’ve used linq to Entity Framework in code-behind to pull the record, and a asp.net DataSourceControl to hold the returned record. All good so far.
Now, what’s the best way to show the record and allow edits? DataGridView and ListView are great for offering Edit/Update on multiple records in a grid-type view, but is there some way I can use those, or something similar, to edit/update all or parts of this record? Horizontally rather than vertically?
If not, any suggestions on the best way to handle this? This is my first asp.net c# project, and I’m struggling!

Answer 1

For single edit of an object, I’ll never use any of these “data controls” which use an ObjectDataSource … What I usualy do, for exemple, if I have a employee-list.aspx page, is creating another page named employee-edit.aspx?employeeid=1 from where I add and also manually bind every fields one by one and do it all on my own. I prefered that for these 3 reasons :

• Gives me much more flexibility
• Allow me to not have a web page with a gigantic viewstate which may reduce the page speed
• Also reduce a lot the number of code line in page’s backend.