Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 9. Running and Debugging Our Application

The LightSwitch Runtime Experience

We’ve built our data model. We’ve added some business logic. We’ve added authentication and even done some personalization to our application. Now that the fundamental portions of the application have come together so nicely, let’s discuss the runtime experience and how we can troubleshoot, debug, and understand what’s happening when users run our application.

The LightSwitch Grid Control

The editable grid in LightSwitch supports a number of scenarios automatically that you would implement manually in most other development environments. If you find that it doesn’t meet your needs, you can of course leverage custom Silverlight controls from third-party vendors, but let’s focus on what we get out of the box.

Sorting

Simply click on a column header to sort the grid by that column. You’ll see an arrow appear on the column header indicating the column that is sorted and the sort order. Click that column again to toggle between ascending and descending sorts.

Export to Excel

From an end user perspective, if you are running the app as a desktop application, you can export the current contexts of any grid to Excel (Figure 9-1). Due to the Silverlight security sandbox restrictions, this functionality is not available when running as a web application. There are other options to consider if you need to run as a web application. In addition to third-party extensions, many folks will embed a link to a Reporting Services ...