eb Forms that require only controls and functionality provided by the built-in ASP.NET Web server controls are easy to create. But creating Web Forms that require or are designed with extended controls and functionality can be a challenge.
In 2000, I worked on a client database in SQL Server that included 134 tables. I designed the application so that the client could use stored procedures to access all data. In my design, each table had a minimum of four stored procedures for working with its data. Such stored procedures common to each table are referred to as either the NURD (New, Update, Read, Delete) stored procedures for the table or the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) stored procedures for the table depending on who you ask.
Many times the code contained in these stored procedures would be extremely repetitious with the only difference between the New/Create stored procedures for each table being table and column names while the rest of the code remained the same. This also applies to the other types of stored procedures for each table. Each table could then have additional stored procedures beyond the NURD stored procedures. Since there is so much repetition between the types of stored procedures from table to table, the task of creating these stored procedures turns into a lengthy period of copying, pasting, modifying, and saving code several hundred times.
The development team I worked with estimated that we would spend approximately 90 hours to create the NURD stored procedures. We dreaded this mundane task. As a solution, my team created an automated stored procedure builder using classic ASP and SQL Distributed Management Objects (SQL-DMO). I’ll outline how this tool was created in a future article.
In 2001 (.NET beta 2), I migrated this automated stored procedure builder from classic ASP to ASP.NET and consolidated it from a series of classic ASP Web pages to a single ASP.NET Web Form. Although I was working on other ASP.NET projects as well, through this migration I learned some important things about ASP.NET. The most significant thing I learned related to the event life cycle of ASP.NET Web Forms.
An Example Scenario
The migration project mentioned above requires too much explanation and would take this article down a different road than intended, so I’ll use a sample Web Form to illustrate the principles that I will teach you.
My sample Web Form simply lists some company types in a drop down list box. Once you select a type of company, the form lists all of the companies for the selected type. Although the migration project above employed custom button type controls, this sample application uses built-in Web server buttons that you can click to display details for a company from those listed, as shown in Figure 1.
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The Page Event Life Cycle
By far, the most commonly used function member listed in Table 1 is the OnLoad() function member. In fact, when you create any type of ASP.NET Web item such as a Web Form or a Web user control, Visual Studio .NET automatically adds this function member to the code behind class for you, whereas you must manually add (override) most of the other function members. In this function member, the current values of the controls on the Web Form are available and code may interact directly with them. Let me state a few very important observations in relation to dynamically created controls.
You can dynamically create controls and wire events into them at any point in the execution process. However, you can only wire events into a control in either the OnInit() function member or in the OnLoad() function member. If the events are encountered at any other point in the cycle of events, it will not cause an exception to be thrown but it will have no affect on the control. The code snippet below shows an example of wiring an event into a control in the OnInit() function. Levels of Events Validation events are handled by validation controls on the client’s machine at the page level via snippets of JScript embedded in the page. Validation events will either return a true or false value based upon the success of the validation process. If validation fails, the controls will not allow the page to be posted back to the server. Depending upon the type of control you use, each ASP.NET Web server control may raise events based upon user interaction. For instance, a DropDownListbox control will raise a SelectedIndexChanged event when the user selects a different option from the DropDownListbox. If the control has its AutoPostBack property set to true, raising certain events will cause the page to be posted back to the server. By default, only the Button, LinkButton, and ImageButton controls automatically cause the page to be posted back to the server. When controls raise events that do not cause the page to be posted back to the server, a note that the event was raised is cached in the ViewState of the page. Cached events are handled in the postback process just after the OnLoad() function member has completed executing.
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