SilverlightShow: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5 Comments

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

chrisanderson — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:01:19 GMT

Hi Taiwo. I can see where this might be a bit confusing. You need to set the DisplayMemberPath property on the ComboBox to "Value" (when the bound item source is a dictionary). I've not applied this on each ComboBox individually, but defined it in the style resource for the page (usercontrol) so it could be applied easily to multiple controls. Look for the definition of ComboBoxStyle in the ProductDetailsPage.xaml file in my sample project to see how I did it, though there's nothing stopping you from setting this property as an inline style on each control definition. Hope this helps. Chris

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

Taiwo Ojo — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:17:35 GMT

Thanks for this article,but i have one question to ask,I could't load my combo with just description ,it was showing both ID and DESCRIPTION part at the same time , please what have i done wrong?

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

nigelman — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:49:56 GMT

:'-) Snif, snif. Yeah! I'm not alone! You make me feel better than 2-days ago.

The ComboBox Nightmare... This is not the only problem I have with this control. Moreover, I'm trying to find/use the DropDownOpening event, that is in the AutoCompleteBox published by Codeplex (Silverlight Toolkit). Simply this is not implemented in ComboBox Control.

Thanks!

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

Andrus — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:51:28 GMT

Bob, where to download your great modifications ?

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

Trifee — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:13:52 GMT

Thank you Chris for the reply. I will continue my search. Thanks again.

trifee

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

chrisanderson — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:59:08 GMT

Hi Trifee

Sorry, I don't currently have any popup or draggable windows sample code. You may like to look at http://www.codeplex.com/SilverlightDesktop as it might help you with that sort of functionality.

Chris

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

surya — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 02:33:29 GMT

Its an excellent article. ...

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

Trifee — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:25:56 GMT

Hello again!

I saw Part 4 and Part 5 of this series and even got more excited with this Framework!

I would like to know if you have any code sample of popup and ... also draggable windows that we can easily integrate with this Silverlight framework.

Thank you and again ... more power to you!

trifee

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

Danijel — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 06:52:57 GMT

Thanks for the posts!

No doubt, Silverlight is the struggle... I am coming from Asp.Net into Silverlight/Xaml/WPF/Ado.Net Data Services/Entity Framework... ;) long way to go, definetely!

Danijel

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

chrisanderson — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:08:59 GMT

Hi Sarah, I forgot to answer the question you had. There are a lot of related details with a product stored in the database (such as cost history, pictures, reviews, documents, etc) which the use of expanders/accordions would be best, so I probably will get around to talking about this sometime in the future. Printing forms and converting to PDF will be covered in my next article coming very soon. I'm not quite sure what you mean by authorise forms - do you mean in a workflow scenario? If so, that is a common LOB scenario so it would be good to cover it, though I haven't got it scheduled to be covered as yet. Searching all fields in list summaries is just a minor change to the query in the web service so I don't plan to cover that any further currently. In regards to master-detail forms, I possibly should cover these but I don't plan to currently as I'm not particularly a fan of this type of data entry form structure. I much prefer a drill down approach in my application designs. But for implementing the administration functions I might use the master-detail paridigm for data entry there so it might get a look in.

Thanks for your feedback - much appreciated. I'm always interested in what topics people are interested in being covered, and I'll see what I can do to accommodate these.

Chris

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

chrisanderson — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 07:48:07 GMT

Bob - thanks for your feedback and enthusiasm - it's nice to see someone really taking what I've done and putting it into practise. I'll send you an email and look forward to seeing what you've done.

Sarah - thanks for your feedback. I've seen Tim Heuer's article during my research, but as you say it's a solution aimed towards permitting freeform text entry, whereas I was looking for a means to handle the issue for key/value pairs. But for permitting freeform text entry (which is another thing not supported by the combobox control despite its name) this is a good solution.

Helen - it's a hard question to answer - I'd need more information. The web.config file doesn't need to be modified in order to run under IIS however. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Chris

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

Anthony Moloney — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:00:05 GMT

Excellent example of a data driven Silverlight application. This is saving me days of stumbling around in my first Silverlight project.

Thanks very much.

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

Danijel — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:40:39 GMT

No doubt, Silverlight is the struggle... I am coming from Asp.Net into Silverlight/Xaml/WPF/Ado.Net Data Services/Entity Framework... ;) long way to go, definetely!

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

Helen W — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:47:46 GMT

First, thank you so much for a fantastic series of articles.

I am having a slight problem: I find that the WCF Service code runs correctly when I use the development server for the web server, but it fails when I choose the option of using IIS. With the development server, the port is included in the web service url; using IIS, it isn't. I know I'm a real newbie with this, but how do I change the web.config file to allow me to use IIS?

Thx

Helen

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

Sarah Boys — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:35:48 GMT

Great articles... With regard to the combobox issue I have used Tim Heuer's article to add an editable combobox with autocomplete functionality. Note the Text property is bound rather than the SelectedItem property which is read-only. It would be good if the entries were automatically restricted to the listed items but I guess this can be done in the validation.

Common issues to tackle are show/hide parts of forms (expanders/accordions), master/detail entry forms, printing forms and convert to pdf, authorise forms, search all fields in list summaries. Will you be tackling any of these in your future LOB articles?

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Part 5

Bob Baker — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 05:15:37 GMT

Thanks for the long awaited part 5! As you suggested at the end of this article, I had already gone ahead and started to workshop the framework by implementing an additional set of sidebar and list/form pages in a Purchasing (Vendor) directory as well as the beginnings of a planned set of Help pages in a Help directory (I'll probably use the readily available LinkPanel as the main control on those pages. I started from the inside out (AWBusinessObjects to AWDataService to XAML pages and code, and of course, Globals.cs). This really helped me finally start to 'get it'. I also added an admin user and implemented the typical enabling/disabling of the Administration menu, as I normally would want. Will probably take a stab at hiding it completely for non-admins. Not sure what your new ButtonBase will do to those plans. I ran into several issues there, where you had to do the checking for the user's role in a separate method for the enabling/disabling to actually work. For the Details pages, I pointed XAML Tools at the SL version of the new summary and full business objects that I created with the CodeSmith templates I had mentioned in my earlier comments, and had similar results to your initial products page from Part 4. I did a little styling (using one of the toolkit themes), changed the sidebar to have a gradient background, and put a background image behind the dashboard. I experimented with page caching for the lists, but did not come up with anything satisfactory and thus did not finish. I even experimented with adding some of the Silverlight toolkit charts (dummy data right now) onto the dashboard dockpanels and adding a delayed load (and ISOStore cached) widget to one of the panels as a proof of concept. An issue here was getting dependent dll's from the xap loaded in addition to the pages' assembly. I also found that any Application resources do not delay load, and must be placed in the main app's app.xaml. o, it can be done, but the code out there is not all up-to-date or correct. I will try to blog about that myself. I will probably partition the app I am building (on a totally different data model) so at least the ASP.Net membership administration that I will build in XAML forms against the Membership API based on some of the great code already out there will be a separate download. Once I see how big the app gets, I may also partition some of the lookup data management into a separate app. Now that I know how to request more IsoStore space from the user, that makes caching some of these things a possibility once I nail down a versioning scheme. One of my goals for the dashboard will be for live data update from the web service. I will now take part 5, copy in my additions, and perhaps shove you a url to check out. One comment I have from implementing the other two directories in the main Silverlight app (Purchasing and Help) is that the .cs files are so very similar. I literally copied your's in and went through ten minutes of renaming and adding code for new fields. I have not had a chance to really examine these pages for refactoring, but some kind of sidebar factory comes to mind at a minimum, and possibly a ListPage factory as well (or at least a CodeSmith template). In going through this effort, I am reminded in many ways of the early days of ASP.Net when you spent so much bouncing around between markup and code to wire everything up. What goes 'round, comes 'round, I guess. Thanks again for this series, and I'm really looking forward to the reporting article! Sorry to ramble, but you asked.