I have recently been tasked with learning EF 6 and web forms scaffolding for our group. Most everything works perfect for me and even though I was ready to hate it I don't. There are a couple of things that I can not make work the way that I want them to. When I scaffold some CRUD pages it works great, but I want to set some default values on the Insert page. I am able to set values in the constructor or the properties, but they do not go to the insert page until the click event to add the item. I have tried every way I could think to figure out an annotation that would work on my object as well as in the Dynamic control. So far I can not make anything work. I can actually remove the dynamic control and add my own control and add it to the object in the insert method, but that just does not feel right. Is there another way of doing this?
Specifically the things that I am trying to do are to set a default date in some fields based on DateTime values over a 30 day period from creation time. I also have state and county dropdowns that are tied to more than just the object that I am working on. Currently I use EF6 and LINQ in my DAL to just populate the dropdowns with objectdatasources and they work great. I want to hook them as dynamic controls as well. I know I need the [DataType] attribute, but there is no dropdown option to choose from. Also I am not sure how to hook up the dropdowns to have the county fire after the state fires so that the counties will change with each state selection. Is there a tutorial somewhere that would cover these things. I have searched everywhere and can not find any guidance.
Thanks Jimmy
Since no one seems to know the answer I thought I would list the needed things to help you if you are having the same issues. If you need to work with the data inside a Dynamic control you are going to have to do a lot of conversions. You must find the Dynamic control in the container you are using and parse that to a dynamic control and then you need to dig into the control template of that control and find the textbox etc that you need and parse that into the needed control type and grab or set its value. If you are needing to keep your code secure and must pass Fortify or some other static analysis tool you will also have to encode the values because fortify can not see that it came from a control that was encoded. This becomes a pain in the butt and it is much easier just to go ahead and switch to a standard control and manually add that in the insert.
The line of code if you need to know how this would work is something like this.
((TextBox)(DynamicControl)fvName.FindControl("DynamicID").TemplateControl.FindControl("TextBox1")).Text;
I wrote this from hand so it might have something out of place, but this should get you on track.
Jimmy