This sample is a self-contained ASP.NET application that
demonstrates a few things:
- How to implement a data-result search page built with
ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas that can present hundreds of thousands of row results
using the ASP.NET 2.0 GridView control. The results are formatted using a
“paging” based UI model – where 15 results per page are displayed, and the user
can skip from page to page to see their data. For kicks I also added support
for editing and deleting each individual row.
- How to optimize the number of rows returned by the SQL
Server to the middle-tier web-server. This sample demonstrates how a large
query result (think 1000s, 10s of thousands or 100s of thousands of rows) can
be paged efficiently so that only the 15 rows currently on display in a page
are ever retrieved by the web-server from the SQL database (this is done using
the ROW_NUMBER() function that David describes above, as well as the support
for optimized paging provided by the GridView and ObjectDataSource controls).
This avoids your web-server and SQL server grinding to a halt when you execute
large queries, and makes for much more scalable performance.
- How to easily implement Ajax UI support for
paging/editing/deleting on top of hundreds of thousands of rows of data (so no
full page refreshes – instead it only updates the portion of the page that
changes). This took me only 60 seconds to-do, and uses the same
<atlas:updatepanel> control support I talked about in this earlier blog post.
- How to easily implement Ajax UI support for adding
“auto-suggest” behavior to controls like text-boxes. The December release of
the Atlas Project provides a super-easy server control called the
<atlas:autocompleteextender> control that you can point at a TextBox, and
that will then call a web-service to provide a list of suggestions when a
browser user starts typing in the text-box. This sample demonstrates how to
use this to auto-suggest items based on the contents in the database.
- How to implement a business class façade/wrapper around a
data access layer. This is in turn used by the new ASP.NET 2.0
ObjectDataSource control for databinding scenarios. For this simple sample, I
could have just used the data access layer built by using File->Add New
Item->DataSet from the ObjectDataSource control directly (like I did with my
earlier To-do
List sample), and basically eliminate the need to write any code in the
app. But I wanted to use this sample to help demonstrate how to build a richer
business library layer abstraction that was separate from my data access
layer. The business layer implementation in this sample is pretty trivial (and
doesn’t really add much value), but it demonstrates a skeleton of how/where you
could easily add business logic rules that were cleanly separated from your
data layer.