Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
NOTE
It is not necessary to specify both
ShortName
and
Name
properties of the
DisplayAttribute
if they have the same value. If the
ShortName
is not specified,
Dynamic Data automatically uses the
Name
instead.
Prompt Annotation
The
DisplayAttribute
includes several additional properties that can be used to further
tune the appearance of the entity property in dynamically generated pages, although not
all of them are supported by the Dynamic Data out of the box. In particular, the
Prompt
property of the
DisplayAttribute
could be used to provide a custom string for use in
form labels, similar to how the
ShortName
property specifies display name for grid column
headers. To implement this, you can simply change the dynamic entity template,
Default.ascx
, to use the prompt string if it was specified and otherwise fall back to using
the display name string, as shown next:
protected void Label_Init(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var label = (Label)sender;
label.Text =
this.currentColumn.Prompt
??
this.currentColumn.DisplayName;
}
NOTE
Here and in the rest of this chapter, assume dynamic entity templates
Default.ascx
,
Default_Edit.ascx
, and
Default_Insert.ascx
have been combined into a single,
multimode template,
Default.ascx
, as discussed in Chapter 10, “Building Custom
Forms.”
This code first appeared in Listing 10.6 and was discussed in detail in Chapter 10. The
Label_Init
method handles the
Init
event of the
Label
control the entity template
generates for each entity property. The
currentColumn
field contains a reference to the
MetaColumn
object describing the current entity property for which a label and a data
entry control are being generated. The original version of this code initialized the label
Text
using only the
DisplayName
property of the
MetaColumn
object. The new version just
shown first tries to initialize the label text using the
Prompt
before falling back to the
DisplayName
.
