Is this possible

[Bob Cummings]

Greetings

I am a student doing a senior project in ASP.NET. The project is to
build an "on-line" card catalogue for a training library for a local
company. The library contains several different types of media; books,
DVD, VHS tapes among others.

Each of these different types of media have different attributes the
client wants to display such as run time for the audio visual media and
number of pages for the books or magazine articles.

Is there anyway to create the web pages "on the fly", probably from some
sort of data connection (XML or otherwise), for viewing or entering new
media into the system. I know I can make the pages as needed for each
type of media and then just call them as needed, but I just believe
there must be a better way (write code to write code). My main concern
is as time goes on there will probably be newer types of media added to
the training center and then another page will have to be created to
handle that as opposed to the web page being dynamic enough to be
created from some database table headers.

In my Java class I was able to write a class that could read a text file
and create the screen from it using flow layout I think. But that was
two years ago.

Thanks for reading this far.

Bob

PS Of course this is just a senior project and after May 13th I will
never have to deal with this system again (unless they hire me <grin>)
but I would like to do the best job possible.

 

[Cowboy \(Gregory A. Beamer\)]

You can create pages on the fly. You can also create a system where the
pages are all virtual, using the HtppHandler, which is much like an ISAPI
filter.

XML is also an option, as you can render the page content based on the data,
via XSLT. I have an example of XML/XSLT transformations directly to the HTTP
stream in the downloads for my book. You can find it (ADO.NET and XML:
ASP.NET on the Edge) at http://www.wiley.com/extras. It was written for
version 1.0, but the theory is still sound (NOTE: VB.NET, so you will have
to translate for C#).

--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP; MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA

**********************************************************************
Think Outside the Box!
**********************************************************************

 

[Curt_C [MVP]]

well, you have a bunch of options.
You could dynamically populate a datagrid depending on the "media" type.
You could maintain one page with a seperate user control for each type
(I'm sure there are many other idea)
or, as you suggested, make a different page for each type (not a big deal).

The thing is you are always going to have to do some work when a new type is
added, to indicate what to display. Really though you should be able to do
it pretty much any way you can think of.

 

[Bob Cummings]

You can create pages on the fly. You can also create a system where the
pages are all virtual, using the HtppHandler, which is much like an ISAPI
filter.

XML is also an option, as you can render the page content based on the data,
via XSLT. I have an example of XML/XSLT transformations directly to the HTTP
stream in the downloads for my book. You can find it (ADO.NET and XML:
ASP.NET on the Edge) at http://www.wiley.com/extras. It was written for
version 1.0, but the theory is still sound (NOTE: VB.NET, so you will have
to translate for C#).

Cowboy

Thanks a bunch. I am downloading the appropriate chapters now and will
take them to school to read and digest.

Bob