I’m coming from a Rails background and doing some work on a ASP.NET project (not ASP MVC). Newbie question: what’s the easiest way to make a custom editor for a table of records?
For example: I have a bunch of data rows and want to change the ‘category’ field on each — maybe a dropdown, maybe a link, maybe the user types it in.
In Rails, I’d iterate over the rows to build a table, and would have a form for each row. The form would have an input box or dropdown, and submit the data to a controller like ‘/item/edit/15?category=foo’ where 15 was the itemID and the new category was ‘foo’.
I’m new to the ASP.NET model and am not sure of the ‘right’ way to do this — just the simplest way to get back the new data & save it off. Would I make a custom control and append it to each row? Any help appreciated.
You can REALLY cheat nowadays and take a peek at the new Dynamic Data that comes with .NET 3.5 SP1. Scott Guthrie has a blog entry demoing on how quick and easy it’ll flow for you here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/14/new-asp-net-dynamic-data-support.aspx
Without getting THAT cutting edge, I’d use the XSD generator to generate a strongly typed DataSet that coincides with the table in question. This will also generate the TableAdapter you can use to do all your CRUD statements.
From there, bind it to a DataGrid and leverage all the standard templates/events involved with that, such as EditIndex, SelectedIndex, RowEditing, RowUpdated, etc.
I’ve been doing this since the early 1.0 days of .NET and this kind of functionality has only gotten more and more streamlined with every update of the Framework.
EDIT: I want to give a quick nod to the Matt Berseth blog as well. I’ve been following a lot of his stuff for a while now and it is great!