Tips & Tricks for ASP.NET, IIS, and Visual Web Developer : Data

Tip#96: Did you know…You could publish your SQL databases using the SQL Publishing Wizard?

WebDevTools — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:05:51 GMT

You can use the SQL Publishing wizard in VS 2008/VWD 2008 to deploy a local database from your development machine to a hosting environment on a remote machine.

This is how you will accomplish this:

Step 1: Create a new web site by selecting menu File ->New Web Site. Switch to Server Explorer and add a new Data connection and connect to a database. In this case we will use the Northwind database that comes with SQL Express. You should point to the database you want to publish.

Step 2: Select Northwind.dbo node in Server explorer and right click to bring up the context menu. In the Context menu you have a “Publish to provider…” option.

Step 3: Click “Publish to provider …” to launch the Database Publishing Wizard.

Step 4: Click Next to select the mode. Let us go with “Script to file” mode. We will need to specify the .SQL file name and location.

Step 5: Click Next and you will get to the Publishing Options. On this page, select the script for target database (SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005) and the types of data to publish (Schema, Data or Schema+Data). You also have the option to drop existing object in script if you want to.

Step 6: Keep the default selection and hit next and generate the .SQL script.

Step 7: The .SQL file generated contains a script that you can run on any SQL server to re-create all the tables, sprocs, views, triggers, full-text catalogs, etc. for a database, as well as import and add all of the table row data that was in the database at the time the .SQL file was created.

Step 8: The .SQL file is a plain text file. You can open it in your favorite editor and customize it as you need.

Step 9: Now that we have our .SQL files, we can go about using them to install our database at our hoster. Exactly how to install the .SQL files will vary depending on how the hoster give access to our SQL account. Some hosters provide an HTML based file-upload tool that allows you to provide a .SQL file - which they will then execute against the SQL database you own.

Other hosters provide an online query tool (like below) that allows you to copy/paste SQL statements to run against your database. If you have a hoster which provides an online query tool like this, then you can open the .SQL file with a text-editor and copy/paste the contents into the query textbox and run it.

You can find my original post here.

Reshmi Mangalore
SDET, Visual Web Developer.

Tip#65: Did you know...How to quickly create a GridView that is hooked up to a SQL table?

WebDevTools — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:02:00 GMT

In Tip#64, we showed you how to convert a GridView's bound fields into template fields. In this tip, we will show you how to quickly create a GridView that is hooked up to a SQL table.

Typically, if you want a GridView then you need to add it to the page, and then add the datasource and hook the two up through a wizard. But here's a much quicker way to create and hookup the two.

First, if you don't have a connection to your database, then you will need to add it in the Server Explorer (right side of Figure 1).
Once that is done, you can expand the Tables node in your connection and find the table you want your GridView to be hooked up to initially.

Figure 1 (click to enlarge)
Finally, you drag and drop the selected table onto the webform and that's it! You just created a GridView that is hooked up to your table in just three steps or less.

Figure 2

From here on, you can fine tune the GridView and datasource to meet your needs.

Roger Wong
SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip #61: Did you know… How to create an ASP.Net Dynamic Data Web Site?

WebDevTools — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:54:22 GMT

If your web site is heavily data driven then here is a quick and easy way for you to create one without writing much code. All you need is Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 installed on your box.

Dynamic Data Web Sites makes use of a mechanism called Scaffolding. When Scaffolding is enabled it lets ASP.Net go through your data model and generate web pages for your tables. These generated pages have Insert, Delete and Update capabilities for each table.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Create a Dynamic Data Web Site.

Go to File ->New Web Site and select Dynamic Data Web Site template. Give it a name and select the location and language to be used. Click Ok button.

Step 2: Add data to your Web Site.

Copy paste pubs.mdf file that you want to use in your App_Data folder.

Step 3: Create a Data model using LINQ to SQL.

Right click on App_code and Add New LINQ to SQL Classes. On selecting the LINQ to SQL Classes the DataClasses.dbml opens up in your O/R Designer.

Step 4: Drag drop tables to Object Relational Designer.

Now drag drop Authors table on to the O/R Designer from server explorer and save DataClassses.dbml.

Step 5: Look what VS has created for you.

Note that there are two files DataClasses.dbml.layout and DataCalsses.designer.vb present under the .dbml file node.

Open DataCalsses.designer.vb, and you can see that there is a Partial Public Class DataClassesDataContext. This file also contains an entity class for Author table (Partial Public Class author).

Step 6: Register the data context in Global.asax file.

Open global.asax page and add the following lines of code in RegisterRoutes method.

VB code:

model.RegisterContext(GetType(AdventureWorksDataContext), _ New ContextConfiguration() With {.ScaffoldAllTables = True})

C# code:

model.RegisterContext(typeof(AdventureWorksDataContext), new ContextConfiguration() { ScaffoldAllTables = true });

Save the file.

Step 7: View the page in Browser

Now you can view default.aspx page using View in Browser. This will show you a link for Authors table.

Click on the table name and you will see a page with data from Authors Table. There is also readymade option for you to Edit, Delete and Insert new data.

Try this today and have fun!

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Web Development Tools

Tip # 53: Did you know... How to edit the templates for gridview in VS designer?

WebDevTools — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:44:04 GMT

Gridview control has the flexibility to be configured how it's rendered using templates. Following steps show how the control's edit template can be changed in the Visual Studio Designer.

I have a GridView hooked up to Sqldatasource using Northwind.products. I have selected Generate Insert, update and delete statements while configuring the sql data source (by clicking the Advanced button)
Click on smart task for grid view & select Enable Editing check box for the grid view
Now to convert a column to use Template field. Select Edit columns from the Grid view Smarttask.
Select the column name in the selected fields list and click on Convert this field into TemplateField & click OK
Select Edit Templates from the gridview smarttask
From the Display drop down select EditItemTemplate
You will see the following
You can update the template now. For example, I have dragged dropped requireFiledValidator into it
If there are multiple columns converted to templates, you will see something like this & can select a particular column template to be edited.
Switching to the source view, you will find that VS has generated the source code for the template changes done.
Click on 'End template editing' from the smart task to exit editing the template

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer