ASP.NET 4 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 21A. Dynamic Data in Web Forms

Dynamic Data is a framework that enables you to create a fully functional data-driven web application in only five minutes. In the previous lessons I have shown you how to extend the simple sample application that Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express creates when you use the ASP.NET Web Application template. In this lesson I show you how to create a data-driven application that uses the Dynamic Data framework.

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express provides two different templates for creating applications that use Dynamic Data:

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data Entities Web Application — This template uses an Entity Data Model to access the data.

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data Linq to SQL Web Application — This template uses LINQ to SQL to access the data.

THE DYNAMIC DATA ENTITIES WEB APPLICATION TEMPLATE

In this lesson I use the ASP.NET Dynamic Data Entities Web Application template. Unlike with the other templates that I have demonstrated in this book, you cannot immediately run a new web application that uses the Dynamic Data framework. Instead, you must do two things before the application can run:

1. Add an Entity Data Model.

2. Update the Global.asax file.

Figure 21A-1 shows the Entity Data Model (EDM) that I use in this lesson. This is the same model I used in Lesson 20A.

Figure 21A.1. FIGURE 21A-1

The namespace for the EDM is Models and the entity container is ...