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 #45: Did you know…How to change the DynamicData folder location?

WebDevTools — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:29:05 GMT

ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a framework that lets you create data-driven ASP.NET Web applications easily. It does this by automatically discovering data-model metadata at run time and deriving UI behavior from it.

By default for a Dynamic data Web Application the dynamic data folder is created in the root folder. Your application might require it to be moved to a different location.

Following are the steps to achieve this in VS 2008 SP1.

Choose which folder your want it to be moved to. For example, lets move it to admin folder. Create admin folder and move DynamicData folder under it.
In Global.asax add the following

model.DynamicDataFolderVirtualPath = "~/admin/DynamicData";
Change the content of files under admin/Dynamicdata you moved in step1 to reflect the new path location (~/admin/Dynamicdata).

For example,
- change the register directive src attribute in List.aspx and ListDetails.aspx
- img src in List.aspx and master page
- any other content which you might have customized and has to use the new path location

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer

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

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

Tip #45: Did you know…How to change the DynamicData folder location?