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Phase 5 / Overview: Customizing Field Templates

As introduced in Phase 3, Field Templates are the user interface for displaying and editing DataFields. They apply the business rules associated with the DataAnnotations of the DataFields. Their job is to ensure the Web Form developer does not deal with (or violate) business rules, but still have control over the user interface.


Go to the Field Templates Overview

One challenge when using templates is that they have a fixed layout. You would think that means each time you want to change their appearance or behavior, you have to create a new file. That is often unnecessary because of the tools discussed here.

Tours for Phase 5
  1. Select alternative Field Templates - Build Field Template files with an alternative user interface and select them.
  2. Setting the Field Template Properties - Field Templates expose properties to let you customize them at runtime, avoiding creating variations of a Field Template file.
  3. Applying behaviors to Field Templates - Use Field Template Behaviors to expand the capabilities of your Field Templates.
  4. The Validation UI - Enhance the ways validators report errors.
  5. Play with the BLD Database Explorer Application - Run the application to see how changes to Field Templates impact it.