General Design Approach for WebForms 2

[bitseeker]

I'm converting my skills (and a prototype app) from MS Access to ASP.NET, and as I go through self-training I have some questions on general design practices. The app I'm working on is like a "live" on-line classroom session, and will run like a closed application with fairly complex forms and relatively fixed navigation, more than like an open web-site with "standard" web pages and "go anywhere" naviation (if that's a meaningful distinction).

In Access I would sometimes expect to make a form that would have controls that I would show and hide and reposition in order to enable different functionality, in order to not make several different named forms that I would have to manage.

I'd like to get a sense of whether this general approach is also regularly used in ASP.NET. Is it a standard approach in ASP.NET to dynamically reconfigure (or completely generate) forms (in addition to dynamically loading data into them) at request time, or even to reconfigure them using javascript at the browser, in order to reduce page management overhead (multiple, similar forms) and page request delays (from full page requests/refreshes)?

Any guidance on this, and/or pointers to additional material about this specific subject, would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[davidwendelken]

Many .Net controls (if not all!) have a visible property and an enabled property. Your intended usage is exactly what they are there for!

Take a look at AJAX, which uses Javascript and XML to reduce the number of full page postbacks. I think it might give a better user experience than a simple post-back event.

This was an article I found useful. I'm about to try out AJAX myself.

"Bitarray.co.uk/ben/articles/234.aspx"

I haven't tried out this product, but it looked interesting: "MagicAjax.NET"

They have a 1.1 version that might be worth looking at.

I also understand DotNetNuke v4 (a free portal for ASP.Net) also uses AJAX.

http://www.dotnetnuke.com

David Wendelken

http://www.casetech.net

 

[bitseeker]

Thanks for input. Good to know that basic approach is widely used.

AJAX sounds interesting, thanks for that too.

 

[Guru7777]

If you are going to AJAX-it, I have found nothing better or easier than this:

http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de/csharpsample/default.aspx

That library does almost all of the tedious work for you and lets you just enjoy the happy postback-free life!

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[bitseeker]

Thanks for input. That's a very helpful link, in terms of describing AJAX. I'll definitely give it some consideration.