Programming ASP.NET, 3rd Edition

Binding to Business Objects

Most of the applications that we’ve looked at in this book have been two-tier, separating the User Interface from the back-end data. Many larger commercial applications, however, are n-tier, with at least a middle business-logic layer to separate retrieval of data from the database from manipulation (and validation) of that data before presentation.

An example of a middle-tier business object would be to create a stateless class to encapsulate business logic, and a “model” class that knows how to load and store data from the database.

Tip

This follows the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern popular with many object-oriented programmers (see, for example, the article “Model-View-Controller” on MSDN.com: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpatterns/html/desmvc.asp).

To illustrate implementing the n-tier MVC pattern, we’ll create a stateless business class CustomerBusinessLogic and a “model” of the Customer class named NorthWind customer. We’ll bind an ObjectDataSource to the stateless business-logic class which will use the Model class to get and retrieve data about customers in the NorthWind database.

To begin, create a new web application called NTierDataSource. Add a GridView and use the smart tag and the properties to set the columns from the Customer table you’d like to display, as shown in Example 10-16.

Example 10-16. GridView declaration in default.aspx from NTierDataSource

<asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" ...