Greetings all,

Been a while since I visited the forums here. Been busy with all of our conversions and flip overs. Close to the milestone though...YAY!

After our MOSS rollout I will need to begin working on converting many Coldfusion applications to .NET. Forseeing this is the reason I picked up Vince's book as it has really made things easy for me.

However I came across something that I dont know how to tackle, so here goes.
Coldfusion has a functionality called action pages. These are like the Windows Forms used in .NET. However with an action page you can use the same form to perform multiple tasks.

Example:
You have a webpage frmRequest.cfm with a form to enter data (action add), it has a save and cancel button. After you save the data and go into edit it (action edit) it has two buttons located at the top, one for action edit and the other is action outcome.
The outcome action makes the page appear totaly different but you can still edit and update other parts of the record.

Is there similar functionality in .NET?

I have put a good amount of thought into this and have come up with the following...

1. Use the one windows form with the two buttons up top. The edit button would bring you back to the same page you initially go to when choosing edit from the GridView. The outcome button would hide everything related to edit and unhide everything pertaining to outcome.

2. Separate page that passes the encrypted query string to populate the object.

3. ??????

What would be the proper way to go about duplicating ColdFusion action pages in .NET

Thanks

Check out the FormView webcontrol. It came out with 2.0, and is a "replacement" for the multi-page forms of old.

FormViews are like the other "View" controls in that they have modes (insert, edit and readonly, IIRC). I used FormViews at my last job to replace some multi-page forms (bound to a custom library via ObjectDataSource storing the data in the cache) and found them to suit my needs pretty much perfectly.

I chose the FormView because it gave me the greatest flexibility in terms of layout within the templates. I'd post a link to the page(s), but it appears they're no longer working (hey - they worked when I left :) ).

I'm about to head out - I'll check in later tonight if you've got any specific questions, or you can e-mail if you want to take it offline. Thanks.

Tim

Thanks for that bit of information Tim.
I would love to talk with you more on the regular as a new programming buddy and an additional technical minded person to bounce ideas off of.

I have made the jump back to the MS platform for development and want to learn to use all sorts of features that get over looked on a regular basis.

Do you use a form of instant messenger?