Creating Forms & Controls Dynamically

dilionyi · March 11th, 2009, 09:59 AM

Can someone pls help me with this? Its urgent. How can I allow an administrator to add create forms on the fly with option for adding different controls on created pages.

Imar · March 11th, 2009, 03:41 PM

Hi there,

I hope it's not too urgent as this is not an easy thing to do...;-)

Creating controls on the fly is no problem. Add a Panel to a page and then you can do stuff like:

Label myLabel = new Label();
myLabel.Text = "Some Text";
myPanel.Controls.Add(myLabel);

However, judging from your post, this is probably not enough. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? What do you want to let the administrator do? Do you want to do these kind of things in a WYSIWYG fashion?

Imar

dilionyi · March 12th, 2009, 11:49 AM

Hi Imar,
Thanks for your reply. However, the kind of thing I want to accomplish is this. I have like a container of controls on a page that the administrator only has access to. Then if an owner requests for a particular set of controls to be on his webpage, the admin can create that webpage with this set of controls which in turn can be used by a larger community. Its like 4 levels
Programmer - Administrator - Owner - Larger community of users.

Programmer creates a webpage with a vast set of controls and the entire framework.
Administrator can customize these controls on various webpages depending on what the owner requires.
Owner determines what set of controls he wants on his page.
Users can now access the webpages of the owner and entire their information depending on the what is contained on the particular owners page they're in.
I know this can be done but I have just a vague idea of how to go about it.
I hope this is quite detailed. Thanks

Imar · March 13th, 2009, 04:44 PM

Quote:

Programmer creates a webpage with a vast set of controls and the entire framework.

Using Visual Studio or a web based application?

Quote:

Administrator can customize these controls on various webpages depending on what the owner requires

Again, how? Visual Studio is probably the best tool for this but it doesn't sound like this is what you're after.

In short, there are a few ways to create web pages:

1. Hand craft them using something like Notepad.

2. Create them using Visual Studio

3. Create them using run-time code. You could, for example, based on a database scheme create code on the fly, store them in assemblies with embedded pages as resources and run them on the fly using stuff like Virtual Path providers. However, this is quite complex stuff and requires knowledge about VPP, CodeDom, how the whole .NET run-time, ASP.NET pipelines work, maybe even down to MSIL. This will get even more complex if you want to offer your users a UI to do this.

So, again, what is it exactly you want to do Where do you want to let users do this? Inside Visual Studio or all web based? Please provide much more detail on how you see this happen, how you'll let users create pages, how you'll execute the pages at run-time and so on and so forth.

Imar