Hide some fields from view in ASP.Net MVC - asp.net

I have a table with CreatedBy ModifiedBy and Isactive columns. Using Entity Framework Database first renders all the fields in create, detail and list views. I am automatically creating views by using "MVC 5 Controller with views, using Entity Framework" option.
I want views to don't show these fields and assign values in controller to it. I already tried [ScaffoldColumn(false)] but it works only with #Html.DisplayForModel()
What should i do to achieve this?

I would recommend to use ViewModels. That means you can map your db poco entity to physical representation of your View (known as ViewModel). Then, you can show whatever you want. When you do not want to update some columns, you can hide it using CSS or make it just read only. On your controller side (update action) you just read properties you want to update.
I recommend to follow this topics to get to know more about VM: What is ViewModel in MVC?

Related

How to keep shared data without using singleton in Xamarin.forms

I have a ContentPage with a ListView. I'm navigating to this content page using another content page's button. This button shows the list item count. I have ViewModel connected to each content page. I can update the count when add items to my ObservableCollection since field is adding not from the list page. But when I delete an item from the list view, I want to update the count in that time as well. How can I keep this ObservableCollection as a shared one between these 2 ContentPAges? I know using aSingleton class we can do this. But since my code should support for unit testing it seems I cannot do this.
What is the best way to make this ObservableCollection shared among these content pages?
If I understand correctly you need a single data repository to be shared between multiple ViewModels. Which means that you need to keep a single instance of the repository somewhere in your code base. Depends on your project setup this repository can live in the IOC container or as a simple property within the App class or elsewhere. Also, depends on the collection data type you also may need to persist the data to SQL, local storage or etc. This way it will be trivial to access the collection from any ViewModel in the application.
However, since I don't understand your intents fully, there might be other solutions. Like passing the reference of the collection to the next page and etc.
If the only information you are wanting to share is the actual count of the items in the list, you could use the MessagingService that is build in in Xamarin Forms.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/xamarin-forms/app-fundamentals/messaging-center
So in your example maybe create a class that holds all the info that you want to share and in one page do a
MessagingCenter.Send<ShareInfo>(...)
So you can pass data.
And in the other page do
MessagingCenter.Subscribe<ShareInfo>(...)
To receive the data and use that to update the button count.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data and uploading files

I am developing a small, internal-use only web application. Given its simple nature and intended audience, I decided that it might be a good opportunity to use a ASP.NET Dynamic Data project to get things up-and-running quickly. So far so good, except for one issue that has me reconsidering the whole plan:
I need to be able to upload files through the website. There is an entity in the model that represents an uploaded file. This entity has properties for the file's contents, the file name, and the file's content type. When uploading a file, all of these values are obtained from a single FileUpload control.
Since a FieldTemplate has a one-to-one association with an entity property, I decided that I needed to create a custom EntityTemplate for the File entity. At this point, I have created an "edit" template for the entity that has a FileUpload control. What I have not been able to figure out is, when the user clicks the 'Update' link, how do I get the data from the FileUpload control back into the entity and (ultimately) into the database.
Any advice or guidance is much appreciated.
you can add other values to the dictionary in the ExtractValues method of the FiedlTemplate, what you have to be aware of is that if those values also appear as rows or column in the page template then they will overwrite the values you added. I usually scaffold them as false and then only referance them in the custom field template.
Note you can access their initial values from the Row property in the OnDataBinding event, you can cast the property as the actual type or use an interface added via buddy classes.

Asp.Net MVC Not Duplicate forms when Edit/Add

When we have anything that requires user input (Eg adding a product to a database) the Edit screen looks the same as the add screen. When using MVC .Net how do you handle this? Do you return the same view? Just adjust the model to reflect the change?
Same (partial)view
You create only one but strong typed view (depending on the UI it can of course be a partial view as well). When adding new data return this view from controller action with default model object instance (usually just a new instance without any properties being set), but when you edit, return it with the object instance that you'd like to edit.
Controller part
Regarding controller actions you can have four of them:
Add GET
return View("SomeView", new Customer());
Add POST
Edit GET
return View("SomeView", new CustomerRepository().GetCustomer(id));
Edit POST
Bot GET actions return the same view but with different model as described earlier. POST actions both store submitted data, but return whatever they need to. Probably some RedirectToAction()...
You can use the same view for display and Edit, simply call it from your controller
return View("ViewName")
You could have the form fields in a partial view and have two separate views using the same partial view, one posting to the edit controller action method and the other posting to the add controller action method.
Partial views are used to remove duplicity. You could read an example of this in the Nerd Dinner tutorial.

How to make rich/compound views

I have recently started to examine ASP.NET MVC. I have studied quite a few examples and common to these are that they contain quite simple scenarios, where a view will map to either an instance of a type in the model or a list of a paritcular type from the model.
I'm looking for guidelines to compose/composite views. In the long term I would like Ajax to be part of the equation, but for now I'm looking for a simpler non Ajax setup.
The problem
Here is a description of a contrieved problem. A domain model contains the types A and B.
class A
{ String ID, String Name, int Age
List<B> ListOfB
}
class B
{ String ID, String Name, String Url}
I would like to have a that allows the following:
A DropDownList showing type A information
Details about the particular A picked in the dropdown
A list showing type B's related to the selected type A
A form that makes it possible to edit the data of a selected type A
A form that enables the user to add a new B.
The view should not show all of this at once, instead it has to show different combinations of information and functionality according to user input. Combinations of detail and functionality could forexample be:
Initially only show the dropdownlist containing A's
If an A has been selected in the dropdown:
Show the particular A as selected in the dropdown
Show detail info about the selected A
Show list of detail info of related type B's
The user wants to edit a particular A
Show the particular A as selected in the dropdown
Show form that allows user to edit particular A
Show list of detail info of related type B's
The user wants to add a new B
Show the particular A as selected in the dropdown
Show detail info about the selected A
Show list of detail info of related type B's
That could look something like this (used the web version of balsamiq mockups - what a fantastic invention!):
Combination 2:
Combination 4:
Creating the view and controller
Since the solution has to allow for different combinations of data and functionality, I think it would be smart to have a parent view (not to be confused with a masterpage) that contained placeholders for parital views. Then, the parent views controller could make up the right combinations of model data and partial views and feed these to the parent view.
Finally; the questions:
Is my way of thinking in accordance with the asp.net mvc methodology?
Can you explain/show (not necessarily all of it) how the controller can compile the right combination of partial views and feed these to the parent view?
Can you point me towards an Ajax based solution?
Can you suggest books/links that contain examples of complex views?
asp.net mvc fully supports all of your requirements but there are few things you should get up to speed on:
You should look at implementing view models to help seperate your domain model from your specific views. Here is a good link on how to start this.
You need to get up to speed with a client side javascript framework for the ajax work with partial html rendering. jquery will do this or ms ajax. Here is an example
To your detailed questions:
Is my way of thinking in accordance with the asp.net mvc methodology?
Asp.net mvc is not going to constrain you at all so essentially this is fully supported
Can you explain/show (not necessarily all of it) how the controller can compile the right combination of partial views and feed these to the parent view?
You can use partial views if you want to seperate bits of code out and can easily refresh them by loading them independently using ms ajax or jquery. You would have a controller that mapped onto your parent view and can delegate and refresh partial views in ajax calls.
Can you point me towards an Ajax based solution?
jquery will do this or ms ajax. Here is an example
Can you suggest books/links that contain examples of complex views?
This link talks a lot about this.

Using a Base Controller for obtaining Common ViewData

I am working on an ASP.NET MVC application that contains a header and menu on each page. The menu and header are dynamic. In other words, the menu items and header information are determined at runtime.
My initial thought is to build a base Controller from which all other controllers derive. In the base controller, I will obtain the menu and header data and insert the required information into the ViewData. Finally, I will use a ViewUserControl to display the header and menu through a master page template.
So, I'm trying to determine the best practice for building such functionality. Also, if this is the recommended approach, which method should I override (I'm guessing Execute) when obtaining the data for insertion into the ViewData.
I'm sure this is a common scenario, so any advice/best-practices would be appreciated! Thanks in advance!
EDIT:
I did find the following resources after posting this (of course), but any additional anecdotes would be awesome!
http://www.singingeels.com/Blogs/Nullable/2008/08/14/How_to_Handle_Side_Content_in_ASPNET_MVC.aspx
How do you use usercontrols in asp.net mvc that display an "island" of data?
Depends on where your information is coming from. We have standard view data that we use to generate some of the information we have on screen that we create in just this fashion. It works well and is easily maintained. We override the View method to implement strongly typed view names and use this information to retrieve some of the data that the master page requires as well.
You could write a helper extension to render the header/menu
That way you could have it show in different places in the view should you need to, but only one place for maintenance.
public static HtmlString MainMenu(this HtmlHelper helper)
Use a base controller class to implement generell filter methods. The controller class implements some filter interfaces IActionFilter, IAuthorizationFilter, IExceptionFilter and IResultFilter which are usefull to implement some common behavior for all controllers.
If the menu data is the same on all pages but different for each unique user.
Generate the menudata in an OnAuthorization or Initialize method of your controller base class. First will be called on authorization. Initialize will be called before every action method. You have access to ViewData Context. Generate the menudata there.
Put the view content for menu and header into the master page and access generated ViewData there.
I tackled a similar design challenge a couple months ago - implementing a breadcrumb feature that changes as user navigates from page to page.
I overrided the OnActionExecuting method to gather the breadcrumbs and store them in ViewData (I use the name of the action as the breadCrumb of the view). Then I updated the Master page to include a user control that takes the ViewData and renders the breadcrumbs.
One thing to be aware is that if you were using the default ASP.NET MVC error handling attribute [HandleError] and your error page is using the same Master page that attempts to read the ViewData, you will soon find out that you can't access ViewData from your error page and it will raise an exception. Depending on whether you need the ViewData for failure scenarios, the viable solution is to use a separate Master page or do this: How do I pass ViewData to a HandleError View?
I'll answer your question with another question. Will the base controller have to determine what type it really is in order to generate the proper menu data? If so, then you're defeating the purpose of polymorphism and the code to generate the data should go in each controller, perhaps in OnActionExecuting if the menu is the same for all actions. Pushing it back down into a parent class seems likely to end up with some switch statement in the parent class doing what each derived controller really ought to take care of.

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