Somewhere near the bottom of the learning curve
I’m finally getting into the ASP.Net portion of my AJAX(ish) project. I’ve only recently acquired Visual Studio 2003. I managed to install the software a week or so ago but I’ve been too busy with other projects to anything on it.
I’ve got the javascript part of it work (which is nice). My next step is to generate the page.
The page is a large table of information. I probably should make each summary level its own row, which then would contain a table. But I’m not thrilled with the idea of lots of nesting tables (when the user clicks for details, that’s a nested table within a row). But then, nesting logically makes sense.
Well, regardless, I can work with the “template” I’ve got and make the decision with little fuss at a later date.
Now…if I were working in PHP or even Perl, I’d have this page generated in just a few minutes. I have the SQL statement to grab the specific data I need (yes, it’s complicated). I have a template of sorts (just needs the placeholders filled). With the aforementioned languages, this task is almost intuitive.
But I’m working with ASP.Net (with C# to brush up my skills). I did take a class this past spring on ASP.Net in VS2k3. But not only was that this past spring, it’s all guided examples. Their examples are peachy for their little demos…but less than helpful for me.
What I want is simply a “header” area—to be filled with static information and instructions—then a table filled with templated information, followed by a very simple “footer” area—again, filled with static information. I don’t want a table-dump of information. I don’t want server controls (because I don’t want to force a refresh—thus the presence of AJAX). I just want what amounts to a flat page with database-driven information.
Yes, I’m mostly ranting. I’m sure 75% of my problem is lack of familiarity with the language, IDE and methodology of .Net. And this really is much more of a rant than complaint. Just needed to comment that the method didn’t seem intuitive. Thanks. 