Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 10.2. shows how the Customer edit page looks with the
MultilineText
field
template used for the
Address
property.
FIGURE 10.2
Web page with multiline address field template.
Unfortunately, the attempt to use the
MultilineText
template does not give the right
solution. The
TextBox
control generated by this field template is simply too big. With
several rows of empty space, it not only takes too much real estate, but can also mislead
the users into thinking that they can put the entire address, including city, state, and zip
code, into the same field.
Configuring Field Templates Declaratively
DynamicControl
also allows you to configure the field template it instantiates. You can set
any public property of the field template by specifying
custom attributes
for its parent
DynamicControl
.
First, you need to modify the appropriate field template to define a property you want to
assign. In this example, the
Text_Edit
field template is used for the
Address
property of
the Customer entity by default. The new property will be called Columns and allow you
to set the
Columns
property of the
TextBox
control created by this template. Following is
an extract from
Text_Edit.ascx.cs
that defines this property:
public partial class Text_EditField : FieldTemplateUserControl
{
public int Columns { get; set; }
}
There are several different ways to initialize the
Columns
property of the
TextBox
control
created by this field template. The simplest approach is to use an ASP.NET data binding
expression and modify the markup file,
Text_Edit.ascx,
as shown here:
