I’m in the process of designing a solution for the company I work at (but have just resigned from) which has a very complex application process in it. The process is close to 10 steps (including T&C’s and preview) and also has some very tricky UI-level business rules (mostly driven by a legacy tie-in system).
Essentially the validation is driven by what has been selected on previous forms, and not just the one directly prior.
The solution has already been decided as an ASP.NET application but the more I design the solution the more it’s looking like it’s going to be very difficult to achieve in a stateless environment. It’s going to either end up with query string parameters, hidden variables on the page, viewState or session to pass the information around.
Then I had it suggested that I look at Silverlight, to give it a more stateful environment and make it easier to handle the passing of the parameters around.
I’ve never done anything with Silverlight, other than watch presentations, so I’ve got no hands-on experience with it, but from everything I’ve read I think that it does have potential to solve some of the major problems which I can see coming out of trying to do this with standard ASP.NET.
So how do I go about:
- Is Silverlight a viable option considering what I mentioned above?
- Pitching Silverlight to a company without any Silverlight skills?
- How do you deal with the “but it requires a browser plugin” argument?
From what you’re saying your problem is about keeping state between multiple pages/forms. Sessions are good for that (not so much the query params or hidden variables as those can be tampered with, just having to think about that possibility when developing your app will slow you down.) I’d recommend that as simplest all round.
However, you can also put several forms on one page and submit them together, but have it look like different pages using javascript. It wouldn’t be too hard to do with any decent javascript library, but I recommend jQuery (Microsoft is adopting, over their own, as the standard for ASP.NET)
Same as the silverlight problem if your company doesn’t have many skills in javascript, but at least it doesn’t require a plugin.
Don’t get me wrong, I love silverlight, I love it so much that when it gets market share similar to flash, I’d drop HTML/css/javascript. It just doesn’t seem to fit for you though.