Guided Tour of Peter's Business Logic Driven UI

Use this Guided Tour to explore many of the features of Peter's Business Logic Driven UI ("BLD"). It shows you how to create the business logic classes and create a user interface around it, while maintaining a strong separation of concerns between the two.

This tour builds an ASP.NET Web Forms application that explores the familiar Northwind database. Northwind contains the sales data for a fictitious company called Northwind Traders, which imports and exports specialty foods from around the world.

We'll call our application BLD Database Explorer. It will be presented mostly as a backend database, where staff can edit its contents. However, as a sales tool, we'll also explore how to let customers view products with a highly customized interface.

Look at how the application evolves with each phase

This application uses LINQ to SQL to communicate with the database. BLD also supports ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET and other data access frameworks. Most of the code here is identical regardless of which data access framework you use. Examples are shown in both C# and VB. Use the Language Preferences option at the top of the page to switch. However, code shown in the Source Code Browser feature is taken from the actual application and therefore is only in C#. The product documentation provides examples in both languages.

While this Guided Tour can help you get started, it is no substitute for the extensive documentation provided with Peter's Data Entry Suite. This software uses many techniques that you are familiar with when building ASP.NET web forms, but BLD involves a specific approach to assembling a user interface, to ensure the user interface respects your business logic. If you have experience with ASP.NET Dynamic Data, you have a head start.

Guided Tours menu

Phase 1: Create classes for your business logic - Identify each table that will be included in this application and create classes to represent and manage those tables.

Phase 2: Apply the business logic - Add attributes to properties on the Entity class and to the class definition itself. Where further customization is needed, add interfaces to the Entity classes.

Phase 3: User Interface overview - Start building the user interface by getting to know several key controls.

Phase 4: Customize the layout inside DataBound controls - Until now, DataBound controls have been using a fixed layout and selected by Automatic Scaffolding. Let's customize the layout and specify exactly which DataFields are shown.

Phase 5: Customizing Field Templates - Field Template files do not need to be edited each time you need to introduce a difference. Instead, the Web Form developer can apply settings in their DataBound controls.

Phase 6: Add widgets - Adjust buttons, filters, paging, sorting and more.

Phase 7: Supporting POCO ("Plain old CLR objects") - BLD can use almost any object as an Entity class, not just those associated with tables of your database. Here is how to use DataAnnotation attributes and the POCODataSource to make all of your data oriented web forms the same way.