Dynamic GUI in ASP.NET and AJAX?

[John Straumann]

Hello all:

I am a CRM Solution Architect so not a .NET expert by any means. I am
working with a customer who needs to modify the Advanced find in CRM which
works as shown here:

http://thestraumanns.mine.nu/af.html

Screen 1 shows a saved query loaded in the tool, and you can add query rows
by clicking the "Select" link which will display Screen 2. If you then
select something from the drop down, more GUI elements appear as shown in
screen 3, and note that a new row is added with the "Select" link. You can
add as many rows as you need.

The customer needs to work with Advanced find, but the AF functionality in
CRM cannot be modified in any way. CRM does have an extensive SDK via web
services, most data is accessible, and external ASPX pages can be called via
buttons on the CRM toolbars.

So they are thinking of using an AJAX-enabled ASPX page that is called from
a CRM entity. However they need the GUI to "dynamically build" based on the
saved query they choose, so initially the GUI would show the search
parameters saved by the query as shown in Screen 1, and then they want to be
able to mimic the behavior of the AF tool with the ability to add rows to
the query.

So, does anyone know if this is possible using ASPX and AJAX? I tried
mocking up a GUI that builds itself at run-time but so far I have not had
any luck.

Can anyone make a suggestion of how they can attack this?

Thanks in advance for any and all advice.

John.

 

[Cowboy \(Gregory A. Beamer\)]

It can be done. Dynamically adding controls with AJAX is a bit difficult,
but if you can take a trip back to the server, it is easy enough to set up
dynamic controls on a page with server code. I am not stating it is
impossible with AJAX, but you either have to go completely AJAX or you get
into a position where you have to write the sync mechanism between the
client and server bits.