I'm using Visual Studio 2010 to create a dynamic data site with scaffolding according to: http://www.asp.net/web-forms/videos/aspnet-dynamic-data/your-first-scaffold-and-what-is-dynamic-data
The site displays a SQL table with an "Insert New Item" link, which takes you here:
I have another SQL table which holds some of the information already. I would like to add a function that is called when the user navigates away from the "account" field; the function will query the other SQL table and populate the fields that it already holds for that account.
I'm stuck on where to put the function and how to setup the account field to call it.
It's a couple of years since I did one of these so pardon the details being a bit short.
You can 'override' the default New Item form. In that you can pre-populate the fields with anything you want. I think you have to take care of the Save also, and of setting out the controls on the form and populating them (you've overridden the generated form after all).
Another possibility is to create a partial class which extends the Model class and populates it in a constructor extension (I remember doing various stuff with this technique). There might also be some extension points on the model Context (or whatever its called) which you can tap into - it's pretty flexible as I remember.
I need your help. I need to create a validation framework for complex form which will be generated dynamically.
For instance, user selects some Template he wants to change, then he receives a list of fields to be filled with data. Number of fields can reach up to 150.
There will be few types of validation rules
Regular expresions
Is field mandatory
data type - string, numeric or alphanumeric (can be validated with RegExp)
All the rules for each field will be stored in the database.
The complexity is that each field may have it's own regular expression, therefore validation error messages are also different. I have attached image describing how the control will look:
I'm thinking on using JQuery framework and assign each control to be validated using the attribute, but not sure if this task could be done using the JQuery.
Will appreciate any advices on this!
Thank you very much!
Suppose I have a model named 'company' holding some properties like
Name
Address
fax
And My View (of IEnumarable type (MVC# RAZOR)) has two forms one(form submitting data to different actions) to display list all the available company(existing). And another(form) i used to create new client with Name TextBox Like
#Html.TextBox("name","")
Here i want to add validation to that particular field. Suggest me the possible easiest way?? What i tried is http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/39016/Form-validation-with-ASP-NET-MVC(But it doesn't works)
my view has two forms
Therefore you need two view models because I suppose that the validation rules are different for those 2 forms. So you will have a SearchCompanyViewModel where the Name field will not be required and a NewCompanyViewModel where the Name field will be required.
I'm working on a very dynamic site build at the moment. What I'm trying to do is creating something like a survey that can be created dynamically from a control panel.
In the control panel you add input fields (these are saved in a database), what the user then see is a form that I generate from the database. So if I add 3 input fields to the database the survey will contain 3 fields. If I add 20 fields the survey will have 20 fields.
Now my problem is that I want to validate these fields, and I would like to be able to hook me in with the standard validation flow. I can't create a Model with validation rules since the number of fields and their names are dynamic the only thing I know is what kind of data that is expected in every field (this rule is found in the database).
In an ordinary case I would get the automatic highlighted fields that are not valid and so on thanks to the built in validation flow with ValidationResult and so on.
So the question now is can I somehow simulate parts of the validation and then hook me back in with the validation result, and if not valid, the form prints the error messages and fill the fields with the data that was given?
Regards
Tobias
What I would do is create some kind of expando model, my own ModelMetadataProvider and might also need my own ModelValidator for that model.
Then, you can easily create validation using the Html.EditorFor and other Html helpers, as they use the metadata to create validation.
BTW, you might also need to create a model binder :)
meta data:
http://mgolchin.net/posts/21/dive-deep-into-mvc-modelmetadata-and-modelmetadataprovider
http://weblogs.asp.net/seanmcalinden/archive/2010/06/11/custom-asp-net-mvc-2-modelmetadataprovider-for-using-custom-view-model-attributes.aspx
http://bradwilson.typepad.com/blog/2010/01/why-you-dont-need-modelmetadataattributes.html
validator:
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/Customizing-ASP-NET-MVC-2-Metadata-and-Validation.aspx#s2-validation
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/Experience-ASP-NET-MVC-3-Beta-the-New-Dependency-Injection-Support-Part2.aspx#s10-new-support-for-validator-provider
model binder:
http://www.singingeels.com/Articles/Model_Binders_in_ASPNET_MVC.aspx
This might bo overkill... But these are the extensibility points that you can use.
We're planning to create a web application where users can build custom "forms," choosing which fields they would like, and how the data in those fields should be represented. Users can then fill out these forms in a DetailsView-like control, thereby creating "documents." The documents can be shown in a DetailsView, or certain fields of several of them can be shown in a GridView. At least, that's the idea.
The problem is that GridView and DetailsView seem to be specifically designed to access Properties on objects that come out of a DataSource. Since we want to have completely arbitrary forms, we can't restrict ourselves to building a class with Properties to represent each field. We have to be able to have any number of dynamically-specified fields on a form.
Is there any way to leverage the existing controls so we don't have to re-implement paging, sorting, and all the other things that GridViews are already set up to do, or will I just have to create my own GridView-like control from scratch?
Edit:
More specifically, the difficulty I am having is in getting inline editing to work on the GridView. For example, let's say that one of the "fields" that is added to a "form" is a calendar field, which should display a date as text in read-only mode, and display a calendar control in edit mode. When the "save" button is clicked, the date selected by the calendar control needs to be saved to the database as the new value for the given field of the given document (i.e. instance of the form). My initial idea was to create a special DataControlField class which, given a form field key, would know how to databind thusly:
FormDocument doc = DataBinder.GetDataItem(cell) as FormDocument;
FormFieldValue fieldValue = doc.FieldValues[FieldKey];
fieldValue.AddReadOnlyControls(cell);
... instead of:
Object dataObject = DataBinder.GetDataItem(cell);
cell.Text = DataBinder.GetPropertyValue(dataItem, FieldKey);
This would probably work for displaying the field values, but if the user tries to edit and save one of the FormDocuments I don't know how I would convince the GridView to do something like this:
doc.FieldValues[FieldKey] = newValue;
Currently, the API for DataControlField uses the ExtractValuesFromCell method to put the property name and value into an IOrderedDictionary. Those values are then applied to the given properties of the objects in the GridView's databound IEnumerable. The problem is, I can't work with properties of an object because in this case the object needs to have a completely arbitrary number of fields.
A GridView can be bound to any object that implements IEnumerable. The advantage of using one of the xDataSource controls is that it can implement paging and sorting for you without any additional code, but you certainly aren't tied to them.
If I understand your question correctly, you do not know the number of columns to display in the GridView until runtime. In that case, I would recommend building an array from your form data and binding the grid to that. You will have to implement paging and sorting yourself.
The DetailsView is not very customizable so you should take a look at the FormView. However, I think you are going to end up dynamically adding controls to whatever container you use.
What you need is totally dynamic GridView. I quess you would have to extend it with the controls ( functionalities ) in your description
Here's what I ended up doing:
I created a new data type that contained a Dictionary of answers, indexed by Field ID.
I created a new type of DataControlField with a FieldId property, which retrieves the proper answer value for that FieldId from the Dictionary mentioned above.
I added data type and data keys properties to this custom DataControlField and overrode the ExtractValuesFromCell method so that it could create a new instance of the answer class and add those values to a Dictionary, which was stored under the property name by which that dictionary would be found in the new data type mentioned in step 1.
I used my own GridView class, used the .NET Reflector to see how the normal GridView calls the ExtractValuesFromCell method, and then changed that so that it would pass the same Dictionary object in to each DataControlField. This way, each field could add to the same Dictionary, rather than replacing the Dictionary that the last one had added under the same property name.
I used a DataFieldGenerator to generate the one of my custom DataControlFields for every field associated with a given form, and I told the GridView to use that DataFieldGenerator to auto-generate its fields.
I set up my ObjectDataSource so that it would know how to save all the answer values from an object of the type mentioned in step 1.
It was tricky, but worthwhile.