I want to build into mt ASP.NET application the ability for users to fill up forms, but the forms are not something I can hard-code into my (Enterprise) software.
So I need one screen that lets end users create the forms. Doing it the 2.0 way, I just love what PollDaddy did in their survey editor (great job guys!). How do I replicate that? (don't worry pollDaddy, my app has nothing to do with survey and I am not at all in your domain (-: )
Since you need to login to the site to play with it, I made a 20 sec video of how it looks like. Please see below and tell me how to best replicate this (as simple as using JQuery tip? use an entire open source project? Buy something?)
Requirements are:
support multiple types of elements (like multiple choice, free text, comboBox)
drag and drop
editing of order
click image for video or here
http://frame.revver.com/frame/120x90/1376799.jpg
The AJAX control toolkit is free and would work for some of this items shown in the video. However, JQuery has tons of plugins it is easy to extend and even easier to use. I would suggest starting there and extending it where needed.
Good Luck
You could build it yourself using an AJAX framework like ASP.NET AJAX or even telerik controls. You could use jQuery but ASP.NET AJAX is free and embeds well with ASP.NET pages. You could buy something, but I've yet to encounter packages as such.
Related
I was commissioned to build the following:
Web app to be accessed by all mobile devices - so no Flash/SilverLight/HTML5...
Main page will contain a calendar of current month (ability to navigate to other months is not required)
Each day should display one or more jobs (I am thinking 2 lines of text for each job), and each of these jobs may have a different color, depending on the time.
Database is SQL Server, hosted on GoDaddy, on the same hosting account as the page will live.
I am a newbie in web development and I would like to get some guidance of the best/easiest approach to implement this. Since I am a .Net Windows developer ASP.Net (or MVC) would be the preferred technology (unless you recommend a different one for this problem). I would really appreciate specific help on things like what control to use? Should I create a grid/table manually? How to customize each day's content, so it shows multiple jobs, each job being a couple of lines of text, but with specific color according to the job type?
(in WPF I would use templates, converters for color and everything data-bound. Do these things exist in Asp.Net?)
Thank you so much for your help!
Those links might help you:
Some javascript/JQuery calendar: http://www.webdesignbooth.com/9-useful-jquery-calendar-and-date-picker-plugins-for-web-designers/
A databound templated calendar control for Asp.Net: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/webforms/MellDataCalendar.aspx
You might look at jquery UI calendar or Telerik extension for MVC. It's not "fancy" but javascript.
I have an Administrator that needs a dynamic form generator with layout capabilities on an ASP.NET page so that they can add, edit and change layout of questions that will be filled out by users whose responses will be saved into the database dynamically. The format is very important as there will be an offline piece that will be generated using Adobe Acrobat and both forms need to be very similar in format. The online portion also needs to be fully printable so that the end user can keep a copy for there personal records. Does anyone know of any ASP.NET controls, free or otherwise, that I could use to complete this functionality? Or what would be the best technology to solve this problem?
Not sure I see a question. This is more of my opinion of what you should do:
Im working on something similar. My form generator had a LOT of complicated fields and data to handle and I decided to go with silverlight. I very happy now, despite the learning curve, and the madness async api, because it would have just been hairy to do it with asp.net, pure asp.net with postbacks would just be bad UX and then putting ajax in between would've just been scary.
If you have great Ajax/asp.net experience go with it, but if not, Id suggest silverlight. I got up to speed pretty quick.
In my past projects I've been using webform to implement windows form style complicated backend admin page by using asp.net webform.
Just wondering by using asp.net mvc, can it make this kind of complicated UI page much easier?
This highly depends on what UI you need. For me, it wouldn't be easy without jQuery... but with jQuery it's very convenient.
For example of possible nesting, my app has cart that contains Accordion for customers, with each pane containing custom tabs with sliding animations for orders, with each order containing table of items, where each item can be expanded to show included products details (not to mention context menus to change customers, on-the-fly discounts changing with notification tooltips, popups to show product details, and so on). All this on single page. And I still find it very easy to manage, because all the functionality is well split across MVC controllers and views.
As for "admin part", I use two-level nesting (with second level on another page, but I just don't want to go deep into jqGrid), and it's 5 minutes to setup a new admin page using AutoMapper, custom attributes, and some custom code. Got new entity (e.g. SomeProduct)? 5 minutes and new admin page with grid, custom editing controls and formats is done. With MVC.
But if you need traditional "data grid" approach, chances that ASP.NET will do better. Or maybe jqGrid (or third-party grids like Telerik) will help you, because they have subgrids and all this stuff. I would say, if you don't like Domain-Driven Design, if your application is not object/entity driven, but highly based on raw data tables, then MVC might be not what you need. But I may be wrong because I never worked with such applications. All other apps, I'd prefer MVC.
I've seen a few blog posts and tutorials overviewing mixing in jQuery and the UI elements for Views in a .NET MVC web app. But usually targeted at developers with a comprehensive grasp of the full dev cycle and variations of back/middle tier technologies.
As the front end developer I'm pitching a jQuery-only UI to the back-end dev - he cautions against a non-webforms interface for sake of the code maturity pov.
I'm trying to hit back with "well...it's your pattern ...isn't it elemental to MVC? No logic in the view? I'm reading that to be 'server-side stuff'. You just serialize the properties i'm asking for, or better...let me easily discover what you _can send me...i'll be able to implement the UI via jQuery UI."
So how valid is my position?
Can jQuery's grid be expected to handle at least the bottom 85% of .net's native control (low-to-moderate capacities # of rows)?
How about in-line editing? ...from the grid?
Would working exclusively in Web Services simplify his life at all? and if so, wouldn't that be logical way to build a .net-to-jQuery relationship? - ajax liaisoning twixt server (.net WS methods) and client?
mny thx
--steve...
Don't fight the platform. That way lies pain and suffering.
The MVC view objects are vastly different than asp.net webforms with server controls--you get straight up html. You get jquery and ajax basically for free, with (almost) magic server side ajax call processing.
They are designed to do what you ask. Writing your own jquery ui is reinventing the wheel.
Not only would it be a ton of extra work for no gain. You would be the only developer around trying to do that, and when you needed help, few could offer advice.
If this is an admin interface, and the client has agreed that users must have javascript enabled then I think using javascript to build widgets on the page is a better option than using the asp.net server controls. If however this is a public facing website I would argue that a pure html and css approach is much better, and then use javascript to progressively enhance the page!
Now I dont ever advocate using asp.net server controls, because they spit out poor markup and they are overly complicated to use. Instead I have been using jQuery to do the grunt work and dom querying and traversing. I also dont advocate using jQuery UI because they are missing some very essential widgets, for example no datatable, no treeview etc. I know that there are lots of plugins for jQuery but they are not componentised and therefore each plugin needs to reinvent the wheel to achieve everything it needs. Once you have included all your plugin libraries and css you often end up with a very large page footprint. Also each plugin often has a different home page and documentation that may or may not be up to scratch.
I think that the best UI library is YUI, and you can easily combine it with jQuery. Because each widget is made up from core components the overall weight of download is smaller. Also you have all the documentation in one place with 100's of working examples. Also it means working with the same set of javascript patterns across the board, so with each widget you learn more and more about the library. Hopefully jQuery UI will catch up, but personally I am looking forward to YUI 3 which for me might mean dropping jQuery altogether...
jQuery is a very mature library. It is used by thousands of people across the internet, and I dont think I have ever encountered a bug. YUI is dogfooded by YAHOO so it too is battle hardened.
One thing I did not mention to you is that I am using the default webforms view engine with asp.net mvc. I think it is still the best option as you get intellisense and also Resharper refactoring even searches your views, and the static solution anaylsis can find code errors in your views.
For building my markup I have been using MvcContrib Fluent Html but you could also checkout this article that advocated the DRY principal very well.
I am working on some sort of CRM application which has huge sales data with all the customer leads etc (ASP.NET 2.0/Ajax)
I want to create a dashboard which will have four separate data containers each container will have different sort of data and each container has to update it self after some configured time interval. so I want to update only that part of page not whole page
What should I used in the above scenario asp.net updatePanel or jQuery implementation (which technique and why)
Because performance is also important here.
Both ASP.NET UpdatePanel or jQuery (or a mix of both) would serve you fine on this scenario; if you don't have experience with neither, I would recommend the UpdatePanel way because it is closer to the regular ASP.NET code you're used to.
This article will get you 90% there, all you have to do at the end is to put some simple javascript in place to fire the updates every X seconds; something like window.setTimeout("Button1.click()",5000) if you want to refresh a panel every 5 seconds. If you don't want the button to be available for the users, just make it hidden via CSS.
There are more elegant approaches (using JSON, webservices, client-side templating etc) but that's an easy way to get the job done.
ASP.NET UpdatePanel is easy to set up, but in my experience terrible to debug.
Doing it yourself with jQuery (or some other JS framework) and an .NET AJAX library is more work upfront, but much easier to improve and maintain later.
UpdatePanel's traffic is a lot bigger than the JSON you'd use with your own solution, if that's a concern.
Also you can use dynamic dashboard framework and convert update panels to drag-drop widgets.
It's a browser independent web part framework for Asp.Net.