I have need to provide a way for users to edit tables in ASP.Net. The tables are simple (no master/detail relationships), but there are likely to be a lot of them. What’s the quickest/simplest way to provide a view/edit interface to a table, even considering commercial options (but not Iron Speed Designer. That thing is ridiculously expensive for what I need)?
In its most simple/ideal configuration, I’d want to point a control at a table and be done. I’ve looked at a few ORM solutions, but they all try to be a swiss army knife which just piles on the complexity and tend to be beasts unto themselves.
Is there something that is crazy simple that can help me here? Or should I just dive into SubSonic or something similar?
After some research, the quickest thing I found turns out to be just using linq to sql with a GridView. I was looking for a solution that can easily integrate into existing pages. Without the benefit of auto-scaffolding and generated pages, Dynamic Data kinda misses the mark. 99% of what I wanted was to avoid getting into writing SQL statements and handling the UpdateCommands manually.
Here are the steps I wrote up for my own personal reference. It relies heavily on the designers, but for what I need, this is perfect:
As far as dynamic data is concerned, the documentation is currently lacking. There’s a LOT of stuff that references earlier versions that doesn’t work quite the same now. I watched the videos here and followed the steps here, but ultimately ran into problems when I tried hiding non-editable columns. The update statement generated by linq didn’t reference the primary key and I got the Row not found or changed error. I gave up and used the solution above.
Hope this helps someone else in the future!