Professional Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 24

Dynamic Data

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Creating a data-driven web application without writing any code using Dynamic Data’s scaffolding functionality
• Customizing the data model and presentation layer of a Dynamic Data application
• Adding Dynamic Data features to an existing web application

Most developers spend an inordinately large amount of time writing code that deals with data. This is so fundamental to what developers do on a daily basis that an acronym has appeared to describe this type of code — CRUD, which stands for Create, Read, Update, Delete, which are the four basic functions that can be performed on data.

For example, consider a simple application to maintain a Tasks or To Do list. At the very least the application must provide the following functionality:

• Create: Create a new task and save it in the database.
• Read: Retrieve a list of tasks from the database and display them to the user. Retrieve and display all the properties of an individual task.
• Update: Modify the properties of an existing task and save the changes to the database.
• Delete: Delete a task from the database that is no longer required.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a framework that takes away the need to write much of this low-level CRUD code. Dynamic Data can discover the data model and automatically generate a fully functioning, data-driven web site at run time. This allows developers to focus instead on writing rock-solid business logic, enhancing the user experience, or performing some other ...