Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
6
IN THIS CHAPTER
.
Built-in Page Templates
.
Creating a New Page Template
.
Custom Page Templates
.
URL Routing
.
Page Template Lookup Rules
I
mplementation of CRUD (
C
reate,
R
ead,
U
pdate and
D
elete) operations has been an ongoing challenge in web
applications. The problem is not so much their complexity,
but rather a sheer number of the pages that have to be
implemented in a typical enterprise application. It is
common in web applications to have a separate web page
for implementing each type of operation, with one page for
editing a particular entity type and another for displaying it
in Read-only mode. The resulting number of pages can
quickly become unmanageable in enterprise applications
that have dozens and sometimes hundreds of entity types.
In traditional ASP.NET WebForms applications, developers
sometimes try to address this problem by creating multi-
purpose pages, such as a single page that allows users to
both
create
and
modify
instances of a particular entity type.
Visual Studio even offers limited support for creating multi-
purpose pages by generating the Item, Edit, and Insert
templates for
FormView
controls. Although this approach
reduces the overall number of pages in the application, it
does so at the cost of significantly increasing complexity of
the individual pages.
The ASP.NET MVC framework attempts to solve this
problem by offering scaffolding functionality in Visual
Studio, which generates separate CRUD pages for a given
entity at design time. Although design-time scaffolding
helps create the initial version of the CRUD pages, the task
of maintaining the generated code falls back onto develop-
ers' shoulders. In a way, the design-time scaffolding solves
the problem of supporting CRUD operations by creating a
bigger problem of rapidly increasing the number of pages
and amount of code developers have to maintain.
