Dear Ken:
Thanks for the pointers: the first I knew about -- but turned down to being
too tied to datasets and datagrids (and his warning that he is not sure how
deep it can go before falling apart) --
but the second project, although not exactly what i was looking for, looks
really really like a good find as to a mind-opener.... I'll be spending some
time this weekend pulling it apart to get a grip on what exactly it is
doing.
I think that what I was after -- and probably will have to do myself is the
following.
A preamble: about 6 months ago I was working in php -- and built an treegrid
that built itself via JS on the clientside, from an xml 'home-brew dataset'
that fetched/refreshed nodes...no need to refresh the whole page.
In fact all projects I was doing at that point were about decreasing the
page refresh, and dynamically including JS, HTML, CSS, as needed into the
pages. Getting HTML to look like Flash!
The only problem with this direction was the php: the non-ability to wrap up
my code as components and be done with it: with all my files always being
cross-related, all my projects were ... 'fragile'. Hence looking at ASP.NET
to do [redo!] components/apps as modules to plug-in to whatever project/app
I was working on at that point.
My huge disappointment was the architecture of ASP.NET based on Get/Post and
form elements. I thought we had gotten past that form stuff like 5 years
ago, and now that we had xmlhttp we could do this non-refresh stuff for all
controls. Big mistake. Not only was the viewstate huge, but the actual page
refreshes were consuming bandwidth -- as well as server time to
build/rebuild the interfaces.
So I am looking for a treegrid -- or the beginnings of one that I can
finish, or insight/guidance from someone who knows more about asp.net than
me (that includes just about anyone at this point ;-[ !!! ) that:
a) Reads a datasource tables -- or several, if held together by one or more
ParentID, ChildID tables ,
b) Builds an [xml? only datastructure I can use?] tree of nodes to hold this
info together as one block
c) Pass this xml to a [unknown: can a DataRepeater be used here] to build
the first tree
d) Send this to client along with JS to do SOAP calls ("need children of
node no 3") and add new rows to the grid on client upon return
e) A Service that can accept calls for more nodes -- and update the backend
xml 'tree' so that if the person hits refresh at any point the clientside
and serverside trees are in synch and therefore would render everything
exactly as is--just that it was built server side, rather than clientside
this time....
Yeah. Pretty obnoxious of me to want to throw out the baby with the
bathwater (disregard the DataGrid and ilk) but --- for one, I think this
control covers enough "areas" of asp.net that I will learn a lot...b) I
think it will liked...
What do you think of my mad capper?
PS: again, thanks for the good pointers to that article.
Sky
