Question

In our current system we have a custom formula builder system which is using a tree control and the users can create nodes and write formula based on the previous entries made on the tree, like if a user creates a BASIC node which is entered once(meaning that this value once entered does not change and is carried over to the next period until it is again changed by the user) and then he creates a HRA node with some formula like BASIC*5%, how should you think we go about to implement this formula builder and lexical analyzer using lightswitch.

Answer 1

This sort of thing is beyond the scope of out of the box LightSwitch. In order to do it you would need to build some custom LightSwitch controls. These can be built with Microsoft’s LightSwitch 2011 Extensibility Toolkit which can be downloaded free at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/0dfaa2eb-3951-49e7-ade7-b9343761e1d2.

Remember that LightSwitch is a high level framework. If you need to do a lot of low level code you will find that you are battling with the framework a lot, in which case you may be better off developing your solution with something a bit closer to the metal.