ASP.NET Dynamic form generation and submition

Question

I need to create a form where for each day in the month the user will enter in several different values (Im thinking a grid sort of thing, values along the top, day of the month along the side) using ASP.NET forms with C# backend...

So what would be the best way to generate this form? I dont want to hardcode that many controls as it would make the submition a little annoying but i also would need to be able to give it values entered in previous days and have it display them in the textboxes.

How would i go about creating this form and also how would i get the values from the textboxes in the backend?

Answer 1

Here is an example application that creates a dynamic form and submits it back to the database. It's written in VB.Net but im sure it's easily converted to C#.

http://www.asp101.com/samples/form_dynamic_aspx.asp

Basically the way it works is adding the controls to the form dynamically then accessing the values that are posted to the server with the Request.Form collection.

Answer 2

If you're building from scratch and can use the ASP.NET MVC framework, might be worth checking out the Dynamic Forms project over at codeplex: http://mvcdynamicforms.codeplex.com/

It might be overkill for your situation, but this appears a pretty powerful way to have a dynamic forms approach (you can store the config in an XML file, in a database etc), and posting the data back is handled by evaluating the Request object in server side code.

Answer 3

You can do this very easily using my FormFactory library.

By default it reflects against a view model to produce a PropertyVm[] array:

```

var vm = new MyFormViewModel
{
    OperatingSystem = "IOS",
    OperatingSystem_choices = new[]{"IOS", "Android",};
};
Html.PropertiesFor(vm).Render(Html);

```

but you can also create the properties programatically, so you could load settings from a database then create PropertyVm .

This is a snippet from a Linqpad script.

```

//import-package FormFactory
//import-package FormFactory.RazorGenerator


void Main()
{
    var properties = new[]{
        new PropertyVm(typeof(string), "username"){
            DisplayName = "Username",
            NotOptional = true,
        },
        new PropertyVm(typeof(string), "password"){
            DisplayName = "Password",
            NotOptional = true,
            GetCustomAttributes = () => new object[]{ new DataTypeAttribute(DataType.Password) }
        }
    };
    var html = FormFactory.RazorEngine.PropertyRenderExtension.Render(properties, new FormFactory.RazorEngine.RazorTemplateHtmlHelper());   

    Util.RawHtml(html.ToEncodedString()).Dump(); //Renders html for a username and password field.
}

```

Theres a demo site with examples of the various features you can set up (eg nested collections, autocomplete, datepickers etc.)