Matt Berseth

Last week DiscountASP upgraded to .Net 3.5 SP1 - so I took sometime this weekend to publish demo's for my 5 Dynamic Data posts.  Here is a quick summary of what is out there ...    ASP.NET Dynamic Data - Simple 5 Table Northwind Example Very simple DD site based on the 5 core Northwind tables.  Read more ... Download | Live Demo   Dynamic Data and Custom Metadata Providers DD enabled controls take rendering hints from the metadata you apply to your data model.  This post shows how you can create a custom metadata provider that will provide sensible default values for the DisplayName and DisplayFormat attributes.  Read more ... Download | Live Demo   A Dynamic Menu For Your Dynamic Data This post continues the custom metadata theme and shows how you can use the existing Category attribute to create a 2 level navigation bar.  Read more ......

I spent a few hours putting together a Dynamic Data web site using the YUI DataTable and DataSource components.  I mostly just did this out of curiosity to see how easy or difficult it would be to use the DD API with other components besides the GridView and DetailsView controls.  So I created a DD web site that provides read-only access to Northwind's Customer, Employee and Supplier tables, but I am not using ASP.NET's GridView, DataSource and UpdatePanel controls to render the grid.  Instead I have replaced these components with YUI's client side DataTable and DataSource and serve the data using a web service (paging included!).  Below are a few of the highlights, and don't forget to download the sample and try it out for yourself.  Its experimental, but if you are new to DD or YUI you might find it interesting.  [Update: 9/21/2008]: Added live demo link  Download |...

I spent some time customizing the delete confirmation dialog in the Dynamic Data site I have been blogging about recently.  Specifically, I looked at ... replacing the browsers default confirm dialog with a jquery thickbox displaying a confirmation message that includes contextual information regarding the row being deleted Below is a screen shot showing how it turned out.  You can read on for the details, or you can download the site and browse the code for yourself.  Hopefully DiscountASP will get upgraded to .Net 3.5 SP1 soon so I can get back to providing demos as well ... [Update: 9/21/2008]: Added live demo link   Download | Live Demo   The Default Confirmation Dialog If you use the Dynamic Data Web Site template to create your DD web site, the List.aspx page template will already include a default delete confirmation dialog that uses the browsers confirm dialog to prompt the user...

So I am still playing around with building a Northwind Dynamic Data web site.  Tonight I thought it would be interesting to see what it would take to create a menu for navigating the tables in the site.  I was particularly interested in seeing if I could get some grouping or categorization to the metadata so I could create a multi-leveled menu.  It turns out it wasn't too difficult at all (see the screen shot below - the menu is on the left).  I have my tables organized into 4 categories: Sales, People, Products and Reports.  And the cool thing is that this menu is completely dynamic.  You can add, remove or reorganize the categories without touching the UI.  And depending where you are keeping your metadata you could even do this without recompiling your app.  The grouping is automatically discovered from the metadata and the menu is built solely...

In my previous post on Dynamic Data, I mentioned that you can use the MetadataType attribute to point Dynamic Data at class that contains additional metadata for your model.  This additional metadata will give you more control over how your UI elements render.  If you don't want a column to display in your GridView, want to change the column header text from EmployeeID to Employee ID or want the cell values formatted a little differently this metadata class is where this information gets specified.  The code snippet below shows how this class can be used for customization. [Update: 9/21/2008]: Added link to live demo Download | Live Demo 1: // Attach the Employee Metadata to the Employee 2: // entity that the LINQ to SQL designer generates 3: [MetadataType(typeof(EmployeeMetadata))] 4: public partial class Employee 5: { 6: } 7:  8: // Attach some additional metadata 9: public class EmployeeMetadata 10:...

I have been anxiously awaiting the Dynamic Data release.  And now that it is here (it was released with VS 2008 and .Net 3.5 SP1) I decided I would start getting a feel for what is has to offer by building a real simple Dynamic Data web site that allows you to browse the 5 core Northwind tables - Customers, Employees, Orders, Products and Suppliers.  Read on for the details and don't forget to download the code.  DiscountASP hasn't quite upgraded to SP1 so I don't have a live demo setup.  Hopefully they will get the upgrade completed soon, but I made sure to include lots of screen shots so you can get a good idea of what the screens look like.  [Update 9/21/2008] : Add link to the live demo Download | Live Demo   What is Dynamic Data? I try to keep a close eye on ASP.NET, but...