Best practice for parent / child user interface design in ASP.Net?

Question

Based on the desktop client background, with no real experience in data driven web design, I study ASP.NET user interface design to determine the best user interface template for parent / child data.

I always try to experiment with the Parent / Child presentation when exploring the new user interface platform, so I started here. I think I should use ASP.NET 2.0, I’m exploring various ways of archiving a user interface form that contains the main list of parent records, and then shows the related children’s records in the second grid on the page when I click on the parent. In the end, even child records are parents for other children, so I will also have to deal with this.

Think: clients with open orders / open orders for selected clients / positions in the selected open order ... like this screen on which I built the same thing in WPF: http://www.twitpic.com/26w26

Some of the methods that I saw just create a regular old-shcool table of href links for parents using some method call to query the children based on the selected parent, while some methods that I saw use ASP.NET 2.0 for managing this. Are ASP.NET 2.0 data management data volatile? Do real developers use these ready-made controls or display their own HTML so that they can have more control?

Also, it looks like ASP.NET MVC is all the rage right now, so although I have to keep that in mind. When I looked at a few intros about this, it seems like he took a step backward in time, since it looks like you need to manually create HTML code to represent lists and datagrids, instead of using ASP.NET 2.0 controls.

I lost a little where to spend my energy.

Answer 1

Returning to this question 6 months after I asked it, now that I have gained some experience with ASP.Net web forms, I am going to answer my own question. Using actual Asp.net controls, such as ListView and GridView, is actually not that hard, and I see that it is actually a common practice to use them in forms and not feel like fraud. Of course, MVC forces you to encode lower-level html, but using Asp.Net controls in a WebForms application is great and actually not as complicated as I was afraid it would be.

Answer 2

I will not comment on the parent / child part of what you ask, but rather on the WebForms and ASP.NET MVC that you asked about at the end.

I found that development using WebForms is very annoying. Every time I wanted to make something out of the “norm”, I had to struggle with the framework to make it work the way I wanted.

ASP.NET MVC greatly relieves you of this burden. However, he does this by having all kinds of useful components that you can use out of the box. So yes, there is more manual HTML coding, but in the long run, what will make your page design a lot nicer.