I'm building custom .NET web user control for Umbraco, which looks like single page, with a sidebar (which holds IDs of content items) on the left side of page, and two different content views(which have content by id displayed here) to the right of it.
The thing is, i don't know if this is possible to do something like masterpage/childs principle(in terms of this web user control), so i'll have something like "Master page" with this sidebar, and will render one of two child views to the right of it, depending on id selected from sidebar?
Or maybe there should be some workaround used here?
Will be much appreciated on any help here(like information about how that can be done, what information shall i seek for etc.), as i'm completely new in this kind of stuff.
From what I know, what you could possibly do is have your "master control" set up in your web user control, and then dynamically create one of two custom controls based on the values you choose from your master control. This is also known as a Master-Detail solution (provided a link).
Tutorial 10: Master/Detail Using a Selectable Master GridView with a Details DetailView
If each of these controls was a user control in itself nested inside another user control, you could for example have three web user controls: Master, Child1 and Child2.
Using code-behind, you could easily create dynamic controls based on those you select from your Master control using Events to the "container page". Using these events, you could dynamically create your user controls/pass them variables, and so on.
Here are some articles about events, if you are interested:
Events in User Controls
Events in ASP.NET Server Controls
If you didn't want to dynamically create your controls, it wouldn't be difficult to bind them on demand dependent on the variable from your Master control, and hide them if they are not being used/bound.
You could also use the public properties of a control you define yourself. So say you have your Child1 user control, you could define a public property in the code behind. You can access this in design-time as well.
public int SpecialID { get; set; }
Related
I am working on asp.net application for reporting. I need to develop round about 50+ reports. On each report I need selection criteria that may contain start-date , end-date, name , company etc on almost every .aspx page. these controls can be of type like dropdown, textbox or calender etc .
Any idea to use one editable + shared (not 100% same) web form on every page.
Using ASP.NET custom controls will allow you to create a module that you can insert into all of your pages.
You can also check this out to get you started more quickly.
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1739/User-controls-in-ASP-NET
If you want to make it similar but not 100% same for all apps then just create public properties that you can use to adjust control properties on different pages. For example if some text box should be visible on some page and not visible on other just create a public property in your control named something like EnableTextBoxABC
You can create ASP.NET Custom Controls.
I have a master page and I want to change his elements from different page.
Actually the goal is to create the site management page, it will be possible for example to change a master page menu.
Thanks.
Provide a public method in your MasterPage that changes it's content, for example:
public void changeMenuSource(object dataSource)
{
this.Menu.DataSource = dataSource;
this.Menu.DataBind();
}
Then you can call it from your ContentPages as well as from any UserControl inside of any ContentPage in the following way(YourMasterPage is the actual type of the MasterPage):
((YourMasterPage)this.Page.Master).changeMenuSource(newDataSource);
I assume your site management uses some kind of database? Store menu (menu nodes) in database (create tables or scheme of tables) and use that as your menu source. On site management page create commands for insert/update menu nodes for specific page, on your pages (or masterpage) create read commands for inserted/updated values and render your menu from source.
Here is example I used it before:
http://aspalliance.com/822_Building_a_Database_Driven_Hierarchical_Menu_using_ASPNET_20
We have a win application that shows a web form in a web browser.
In order to get data from this web form we are using a hidden text box and get its text using HtmlDocument object of web browser control.
I want to make an abstraction of this web form that has this text box element so that other forms can use this abstraction.
I made a web control and put the text box on it.I thought that if I put this control on my page it would have the text box.When i ran my application I noticed that the text box had been rendered but had its control name in its name (WebControl$TextBoxName) and its id(WebControl_TextBoxName) and the win app throw an exception since it couldn't find the element by its id(TextBoxName).
So here's my question:
How can I make an abstract web form/web control that has some elements on it and I can use it to make my final forms have these elements on them? (their names and ids should not be changed)
Thank you for your help
dotNet 4.0 supports static id's so they don't get mangled, read up on Client Id Mode
Alternatively, you could override the render of your control to output a standard html hidden form field with whatever ID you want, and then also add a custom property that will return the textbox that will hide the fact that it isn't an asp.net server control.
Though I've never used the browser control in WinForms, I think what you want to use is a Master Page. Assuming what you're rendering in the browser control is an ASPX page, create a Master Page with the hidden text box that you want to grab your data from, and tell all of the pages you want to have that common control on to use your Master Page. When the page renders, the control id will then be "ctl00_TextBoxName". There is no way of getting around the ID concatenation, since unique IDs are needed and that's the only way to guarantee uniqueness with all the nested control abilities of ASP.NET. However, doing this will guarantee you always have that control named the same on every new form you create that inherits the Master Page. Hope that helps!
In summary (because who reads paragraphs?):
Create Master Page
Place your common control in the Master Page
Have your Form inherit the Master Page
You can read up on how Master Pages work in MSDN's Documentation.
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.
I am building a set of asp.net server controls and in one of them, essentially a container control, I want to add a form control, a script manager and an update panel. Is this possible or will I have to create these in a Page base class that I have for the web project for page/control life cycle reasons?
I am not using master pages.
Regards,
Andrew
ASP.NET allows only one form on the page. When you create controls, they are used on a page. You need a Page object to add controls to. This is why controls like the form and ScriptManager (who can only have one instance on a page) are put on the Page itself, or on the masterpage (if you have one). Putting them in a control would provide the opportunity to have two instances on the page, which would not work.