Question

I have an object with following attributes

Books
----------
ID , Name

Now, I want to return an object for a gridview in presentation layer which has a lot more attributes then the original object

Gridview Object
--------------- 
ID, Name, Quantity, Location, ISBNNO, LastIssued

I don’t have any business object composed of these attributes currently & I don’t want to create it just for the sake of a gridview.

How do I create & return custom
objects like these on the fly ? I am
new to DTO’s. Can someone give me an
example to return a DTO inside my DAL
?

Thanks,
Damien.

Answer 1

if you don’t want to mess with your database objects, create a decorator for it

public class myGVObject
{
    public Book { get; set; }

    public int Quantity { get; set; }
    public string Location { get; set; }
    public string ISBNNO { get; set; }
    public DateTime LastIssued { get; set; }
}

and in your gridView use:

<asp:Label id="lblBookId" text="<%# Eval("Book.ID") %>" />
<asp:Label id="lblLastIssue" text="<%# Eval("LastIssued") %>" />