A couple of NEWBIE questions...

[Nobody]

I'm just starting out on asp.net and web dev in general, so be easy on me
... I'm trying to learn asp.net by copying an existing web site, but not
actually cheating by looking at the source... its basically an online
shopping site. Anyways...

I have a master page that has a structure like this:

HEADER..............

BRAND SIDE BAR | content

FOOTER.............

The brand side bar is actually a repeater control that hits the database for
a list of brands and stylizes them appropriately with link buttons...

The "content" area will eventually show a list of all items that belong to
that brand, or a logon page, etc.

Right now I have a "Welcome" page (welcome.aspx) that derives from the
master page, but doesn't show any brand items, its just a greeting page...

I'm wondering what is the best way to implement the brand pages. I have a
few problems / questions:

1) As I said above, the brand bar is currently a repeater control that
populates link buttons... I was using the post back command that gets posted
back to the master page, this all worked fine and dandy when I didn't have
any stylizing on the page, but as soon as I added that, when I click on a
brand, the whole page flashes...

how can I use the link button (or something better??) so that the whole page
doesn't flash when I change categories?

2) Should I have one aspx page for ALL brands? or should I have an automated
system of building one aspx page for each brand?

I'm asking this because I figure with a single brand page, I can build the
entire web site pretty generically with only a few pages, but I'm under the
impression that IIS caches the web pages, and if I use the same page, but
just change the datasource query, it might kill performance, where as, with
each brand having its on aspx page, that caching will work...

or maybe I'm completely misunderstanding how asp.net works

Thanks...

 

[Nobody]

I should also mention that the header / footer / content area is built on a
table, not frames if that makes a difference.

 

[Boris Twila]

did you try rebooting?
hahahahah

 

[Guest]

It would be more concise to use one page for all brands. The issue with the
screen refreshing is a difficult one to get round. You have two options
really, step back in time to frames which is never recommended and not a nice
answer in terms of web standards etc, or use AJAX technologies to only post
back the content part of the page. You will need to read up on those
yourself. Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX (aka Altas) is a good start at www.asp.net

Ciaran O'Donnell

 

[Guest]

Tables are for showing data, not layout. You should learn css
(www.alistapart.com is a good site) and use divs and css for positioning and
layout. The more people ignore web standards, the longer it will be before
browser makers are forced to implement them.

Ciaran O'Donnell