I want to create something similiar to a facebook wall on my social site. I want to store the posts in an sql database and that should be rather simple. What I am looking for is a good way to display the posts? I guess I don't even really know where to start, as I can only think of using a loop to display asp:textboxes. Which obviously is not correct.
I want there to be multiple posts displayed on the page, which should include:
the user who posted,
the text posted,
the date posted,
and if I want to get crazy...a means of deleting/editing the post.
I really have no idea of how to implement this concept, so any ideas would help greatly.
To get started, view this article from asp.net on the Repeater control, or this great article.
The Repeater control lets you databind to a list of objects, and then define one template for how that object should be displayed. Then, ASP.NET will handle showing it as many times as necessary. You can write the code-behind for dealing with delete and edit as if there were only one instance on the page.
go ahead with jquery, use a lot of ajax. for the mark up, use a repeater control with all clean html mark up (instead of server side controls which would generate a lot of unnecessary mark up quickly creating performance issues)
only populate x number of items on initial load, and then using jquery pull data as required based on user action. you can serve this data via json, decode json on client side using jquery and perform a loop which converts this json into appropriate html and injects it into the correct html element
should be simple ;-)
ASP.NET gives you lots of ways to do this. A Repeater, DataGrid, GridView are the first that come to mind. If you'd rather use ASP.NET MVC, there's always the good old foreach loop.
Additionally, check out ListView too.
Related
I believe this is a fundamental question regarding asp.net's way of manipulating database items. Basically the server side way of manipulating database items (using ListView or similar) is outdated due to the post back model is outdated compared to AJAX. Let's say you have forward and backward buttons on the gallery to update images from the database. You need to postback in order to update page. Clearly this could use an ajaxfied approach. I have been thinking about this long and hard and have observed most websites that uses ListView or GridView or whatever do not ajaxfy the process, probably due to the difficulty of this problem. For those that ajaxfy the page, they use the UpdatePanel, which is only "pseudo-ajax".
I would like to know do other programmers have a FULLY ajaxfied way of updating a page of a photo gallery, retrieved from database by ListView? As I said I have been thinking about this long and hard and I think there might be two approaches: First, use ListView to first populate photo gallery. On pressing forward or backword button, use jQuery's ajax method to connect to an .ashx page and use .ashx page to retrieve data items and then use jQuery to update the photo gallery at the client side.
The second way I forsee would be abandoning the ListView altogether and use a for loop in .ashx to populate gallery from the beginning. This approach unifies the initial data retrieval method and the "postback" data retrieval method, which could mean less code needed, since you do not need the aspx page at all.
My question is, what is the realistic way to fully ajaxfy the page mentioned above?
I still use code behind in my asp.net website.. but I do use ajax elements on the .aspx page
take a look at ASP.Net Ajax Control Toolkit
All the Ajax elements, with the benefit or still using code behind
So far the best way I have found would be to use jQuery AJAX to update whatever changes, although it can be much more time consuming than posting back to server and update from there
After data is entered on a web form and then comitted to a database or whatever, what is the best way to clear the contents of the various text box controls and return combo boxes to a non-selected state? I know this can be done from the code behind but is not the best way since it requires a round trip to the server. I know javascript is also an option but I am not very familiar with it at all so is there another option or is Javascript the best way?
Thanks
Note: I'm making an assumption that you are doing a post back to the server in your form to save the data to begin with.
After you've processed the form (i.e. saved the data to the DB) why don't you clear the controls from the page and call "CreateChildControls". This would be the quickest way to clear your input controls before rendering the page back to the user.
YMMV, this isn't necessarily the best or safest way to do this but it can/could work; however I've only used this in custom controls that did not have a corresponding ascx file.
I have an ASP.NET page with a Wizard control containing several pages of form fields. The data is collected and inserted to a database from the code behind page. I need to set this form up so you can not only insert, but edit a record as well. Since the form is long and complex, I would rather use the existing one and not make a duplicate one for editing, especially since I want to keep both forms exactly the same and any edits would have to be made to both. But it looks like this is what I need to do if I'm going to databind it. But this would also involve putting the Wizard inside of a FormView, and then I'd have to use FindControl to access any of the fields which would mean altering all my already-existing code (which of course would be time-consuming). So should I manually enter all the values from the code behind instead of databinding it? Which is better, to use a FormView and have duplicate forms (plus have to go in and redo the way I access the fields), or to do everything from the code behind?
I cheat in this circumstance. :)
Create each screen as 2 separate user controls
One for edit, and one for view
Then you get access to all you usual coding
Then embed the controls into the Wizard/FormView
I would suggest you to Go Ahead using FormView, as using DataBind control you have more control the functionality and layout Insert/Edit/View template. Since you have specified that your form is very complex and long, if you control from code behind you have to do lot of work to handle this in code behind and lot code required.
Since I have personal experience to develope very complex form using FormView and it was easy for me bind the Value in directly in formview instead if you assign/Get Values of each conrol in code behind and sometimes you have to hide.
I have a web service which returns me some data,I am massaging this data and using this as datasource for my radgrid (telerik). The datasource is quite large, and would like to paginate it. I found couple of problems when I paginate it in the server side
I have to bind the grid again for pagination, which essentially means I have to make a call to WS again to get the data. This is an expensive call for me. I would rather forgo the benefits of pagination and would display all the results in the same page, except for it would be a bit clumsy
During the postback RadGrid1.Items.Count happens to be the number of items getting paginated (25- in my case) which is expected as all the items in the datasource are not getting bound. This of course is not an issue. The real issue is that we have some checkboxes which get checked based on some business condition. We add this to our business object/DB later. So if the user has not navigated all the pages, these "checked" items do not get added as pagination limits the "Items" in the grid to those which get bound for that particular page index.
My Thoughts:
I would rather have some sort of client side pagination, where we can hide/show contents than going to the server and doing a databind every time. Though it will return all the results, the UI will not be clumsy and the grid would have "all the items" during postback
Is there a way to do it ?
If it were a regular asp.net gridView, can someone point me to a good article which would serve my purpose
Ram
PS: who else think radgrid is crazy ? (unfortunately I did not make this choice)
Recently during my project implementation (which is built with RadControls and RadGrid in particular) I found a handy example that shows how to get grid data from web service and implement paging with a single call to that web service. Check it out:
http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/grid/examples/client/declarativedatabinding/defaultcs.aspx
Dick
[I don't have any experience in using RadGrid as well as Telerik, so this solution may/may not work for you]
Silverlight 3 has native support for pagination, you can get more info at PagedCollectionView
BRIJ MOHAN also wrote a nice tutorial on how to leverage this class as well as other cool features like column grouping.
http://weblogs.asp.net/brijmohan/archive/2009/08/01/silverlight-3-datagrid-columns-grouping-using-pagedcollectionview.aspx
I have a wizard style interface where I need to collect data from users. I've been asked by my managers that the information is to be collected in a step by step type process.
I've decided to have a page.aspx with each step of the process as a separate user control. step1.ascx step2.ascx etc...
The way it works now, is that when the initial GET request comes in, I render the entire page (which sits inside of a master page) and step1.ascx. When then next POST request comes in for step 2 (using query string step=2), I render only step2.ascx to the browser by overriding the Render(HtmlTextWriter) method and use jQuery html() method to replace the contents of a div.
The problem with this whole approach, besides being hacky (in my opinion) is that it's impossible to update viewstate as this is usually handled server side.
My workaround is to store the contents of step1.ascx into temporary session storage so if the user decides to click the Back button to go back one step, I can spit out the values that were stored for it previously.
I feel I'm putting on my techy hat on here in wanting to try the latest Javascript craze as jQuery with .NET has taken a lot of hack like approaches and reverse engineering to get right. Would it be easier to simply use an updatepanel and be done with it or is there a site with a comprehensive resource of using jQuery to do everything in ASP.NET?
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Another approach, that might be easier to work with, is to load the entire form with the initial GET request, and then hide all sections except the first one. You then use jQuery to hide and show different parts of the form, and when the final section is shown the entire form is posted in one POST to the server. That way you can handle the input on the server just as if the data entry was done in one step by the user, and still get the step-by-step expreience on the client side.
You could just place all your user controls one after another and turn on the visibility of the current step's control and turn on other controls when appropriate . No need to mess with overriding Render(). This way the user controls' viewstate will be managed by the server. and you can focus on any step validation logic.
Using an UpdatePanel to contain the steps would give the ajax experience and still be able to provide validation on each step. If you are OK with validating multiple steps at once, Tomas Lycken's suggestion (hide/show with JQuery), would give a fast step by step experience.
Did you look into using the ASP.NET Wizard control? It's a bit of a challenge to customize the UI, but otherwise it's worked well for me in similar scenarios.