The question in a nutshell: Is there a way to add forms dynamically to a aspx-page? I know how to add controls to an existing form, but how to add a whole form?
Bckground:
I am "forced" to work in Visual Studio 2008 and I want to create a controller, which builds a page depending from the list of elements a model gives it (e.g.: the list may contain a paragraph, an image, another paragraph, a parapgraph again, a form and so on).
This works fine for the first examples as I am able to add them to the inner-html of a div-container.
Thinking about ways to generate a form like this (innerHTML += form), I feel I'd be throwing the few possible advantages ASP I can see (compared to PHP) out of the window in terms of input validation and so on. But I can't find a way to generate a "real, server-run" form. The same goes for gridviews, but I guess the solution may be similar.
A possible workaround would be to create an empty form
<form runat="server" id="dummyForm">...
and add controls to it dynamically. The obvious(?) downside to this would be, that I couldn't change its position (at least I wouldn't know how) in relation to the other content elements.
Another downside would be that I would be limited to one form per page and that may or may not be sufficient. If it wasn't I would starting to add several empty dummy-forms and would start indexing them and all of that doesn't look very cool to me.
Is there a more elegant way to a solution?
TIA
Simon
You can't add more than once server side Form tag in single aspx file
(in run time or design time)
maybe this article help you to generate dynamic forms :
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479330.aspx
Related
I've started work at a company and don't have full access to their previously built objects/frameworks/etc and I've been tasked with creating a new system, using their libraries / objects / etc. I can override most of their libraries, but without seeing what exactly is going on I'm finding it challenging to work with.
It is all in .net webforms, which I'm really not all that familiar with as well.
They have a customs Model-View-Controller sort of system built on top of webforms, which generates full control ascx pages, however of course the ascx file is simply one line, the code behind is empty, so all I can really see is the markup dynamically generated.
I will have markup written like:
<div id="id1">
<div id="id2">
<div id="id3">
<table id="tt_id1">
<input id="myModelNameID">
etc, etc.
The objects as well are named differently in .net vs what's generated in the markup, so this makes things even more challenging - I have to always examine the objects for a while to find the full path of where my control is located.
What is the easiest way to access a deeply nested control?
I've tried to use references to different ID's (like ClientID vs ID), etc. I have found examples here and there but usually people are doing something like what I'm doing.
I'm trying to avoid writing 30 findControls , etc. I could write a method I suppose that would do this, but I'm hoping there's an easier way even or something already available.
When I am trying to access anything in code-behind to access objects I am examining them in the debugger or using a dumper class or reflection, and then writing something like this:
//This is an example that would add a button in a table.
Button MyButt = new Button();
MyButt.Text = "Click Me";
//Split into sections for readability...
Control c = Page.FindControl("ctl00").FindControl("Form1");
Control c2 = c.FindControl("MainPage").FindControl("id1");
Control MyTable = c2.FindControl("id2").FindControl("myTable1");
MyTable.Controls.Add(MyButt);
Plone/Zope's z3cforms inherit from BrowserPage, and therefore should be able to be rendered without the use of an additional View and View Class. When I try to do this, the form renders fine, but none of the form's fields appear. I am trying to solve why this occurs. Keep in mind this example is using collective.z3cform.wizard, which essentially provides two classes, a Wizard and a Step. A Wizard is a Form (capital F) that mostly provides the machinery to glue the Steps together and maintain state with sessions, and a Step is just a Form.
To me, it feels like either the macro is incorrect, the context is wrong, or there needs to be some wrapping/unwrapping of the form. Basically, I feel like there's some one magic line of code or piece of information I'm missing, which is often the case with Plone.
When the form is wired up to use a separate view (which is redundant), the form renders fine with all the fields showing.
Since I understand this is complex, I've built an example-only standalone package on GitHub that showcases the problem. If you install this package into a stock Plone site with buildout, you will get three views:
http://localhost:8080/Plone/working
http://localhost:8080/Plone/almost
http://localhost:8080/Plone/broken
The working view requires a separate view and a whole-template-wrapping TAL tag, which is both kludge and redundant...but it works and renders the form with all of its fields.
The broken view is wired up how it should be, with the form instance representing the view itself, with the template defined in the Wizard class.
The almost view is identical to the broken view, except that the template is associated with the Wizard's Step rather than the Wizard itself. This results in a broken render, but the form renders with all of its fields.
I hope someone can help me trace down why exactly it is that the broken view renders the form, complete with buttons, but none of the form's fields.
Thank you in advance.
Your broken view does not render the fields because it does not try to render the current step. The default wizard template has something like this in it:
<div tal:define="form nocall:view/currentStep"
tal:replace="structure form/render" />
which looks up the current step and renders it. But you've overridden that with your own template which just calls the ploneform-macros, which is a generic z3c.form thing that knows nothing about the existence of steps.
You should stick with the default wizard template instead of overriding it, or if you need to customize it you should copy the default wizard.pt from collective.z3cform.wizard as a starting point.
Meanwhile, your 'almost' view is indeed almost working. The problem here is that the wizard's default template renders the step's template in the middle...but your step's template is set up to produce a full html page (because it uses the master macro from main_template). If you need to customize this template, I would again recommend starting by copying the default step template from c.z.wizard (wizard-step.pt)
I am trying to automate a work flow process .In this,I need to click on a link positioned in any of the rows of table.Thing is all links available in all rows have same element ID and in the source code I have a java script like " ("Element ID" # Onclick..java script****:).....SO here after clicking it is connecting one form to another form by inputting some value in java script code and also one value in java script dynamically changes.How do I click on that link now?Is there any solution using xpath or so...to exactly click on that link based on CSS classID or so...Please help me out..Main problem is...all links in rows have same element ID and dynamically changing java script .
I am trying to use selenium.focus() and selenium.clickAndwait().But these are helpless.as it is not able to identify link ID only.
The best way to do this would be with xpath.
Something like //*[#onclick='javascript'] will work but this can make the tests extremely flaky because if the inline javascript changes or if its removed in preference of addEventListener to the element.
something like //*[#class='cssClass'] will work. I think that you will need to speak to the developers and ask them to help make it more testable.
I have a web application with a form that has disabled fields in it. It allows a "Save As" function which basically means the settings can be copied into a new configuration (without being modified) and in the new configuration they can be changed to something else. The problem I am running into with this is that since the fields are disabled, they are not getting posted through and do not appear in the context object on the server side.
When I removed the logic to disable the fields, that part works fine. So the remaining problem is, how to "disable" the fields (not allow any change of the data in any of the entry fields) without really "disabling" them (so that the data gets posted through when saving)?
I was originally looking for a way to do this in CSS but not sure if it exists. The best solution is of course, the simplest one. Thanks in advance!
(Note: by 'disabled' I mean "The textboxes display but none of the text inside of them can be modified at all". It does not matter to me whether the cursor appears when you click inside it, though if I had a preference it would be no cursor...)
http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/att_input_readonly.asp
readonly attribute is what you want.
i would suggest that instead of using the non-updateable field values from the page's inputs, you retrieve the original object from the DB and copy them from there. It's pretty trivial using something like Firebug to modify the contents of the page whose form will be posted back to modify the values, even if they are marked as readonly. Since you really want the values from the original, I would simply reget the object and copy them. Then you don't need to worry about whether the original (and non-updateable) properties get posted back at all.
I am trying to find the best practice for generating and outputting html which would require a database query first to obtain the info. Currently in the aspx page I have a div with runat server:
<div runat="server" id="leaflet"></div>
Now just as a start to do a bit of testing I have a method that runs on page_load that basically does:
private void BuildLeaflet(string qnid)
{
//gets leaflet details
QueryLeafletDetails();
//return concatenated content string
leaflet.InnerHtml "<h1>" + dr["LSC Descriptor"] + "</h1>";
}
In the real solution the return is a concatenation of about 10 fields some very long as they are content.
I don't by any means think this is the best solution, but what is? A StringBuilder? Can I Write Each Part in turn to the site avoiding the concatenation in the method? Is the server div even best?
Edit: Forgot to put some of my content sections have simple (limited) html in them already such as paragraph, list... This allows me to easily produce documents for web and printing, I just use different stylesheets.
I would use <asp:Literal runat="server" enableViewState="false" id="leaflet" />. This doesn't generate any tags on the page, and doesn't stuff all the text in the ViewState.
And yes, use StringBuilder if you need to concatenate many long strings. This will be way more memory efficient.
The other solution would be to see if you can make some fixed markup on the page and put the contents of each DB field in it's own control (<asp:Literal />?).
I'd use either string.Format, if the number of fields is fixed (and relatively small), or a StringBuilder, otherwise. Readability of the code would be my guide, less so performance. You might also want to think about abstracting this out into a UserControl if you plan to reuse it. Then you could give it settable properties and build the render logic into the control to avoid repeating yourself.
Various people have benchmarked this - iirc format is fine for <4 items, simple concats for <7, stringbuilding above that.
I strongly advise against creating HTML as strings btw.