We have detailed such scenario in the Intersoft Presenter Documentation on the article Walkthrough: Performing CRUD operation using Astoria Data Source Control.

If you wish to know more about the Astoria Data Source control we also have a documentation of the control in the Intersoft DataSource Documentation.

Hi Mark,

Silverlight is a pure client-side technology. So you need a data access solution to retrieve the data from your database and deliver them to the client side.

In Silverlight, we encourage the use of MVVM design pattern to build data-aware applications. You can learn many benefits of using MVVM design pattern here.

I personally recommend DevForce from IdeaBlade for a comprehensive, cross-platform data access solution (supports both Silverlight and WPF). Check out the Contacts sample application that uses ClientUI and DevForce in my blog post here.

Hope this helps,
Jimmy

Hi Jimmy,

I will read the MVVM design pattern information you have linked to.

Many thanks for the reply. This is further complicated in that we have our application defined in XML files. This means that for a any list displayed in the application, we first need to read the defining XML file. This then gives us the stored procedure to call and the params to pass into it. The SP then returns a dataset. The XML file also tells me the colums to display in the list and the format of the colums etc. This is a really great solution as it allows our application to be easily extended by non-programmers in our organisation as we have written an interface over the XML files to allow them to be maintained within the application itself.

So, I need to be able to dynamically build the list structure then dynamically bind it to the data.

Is this something which would be achievable with any of your grid / data presenter controls? This will be a real show stopper if I cannot work out how to dynamically build and bind. My impression is that silverlight likes to have knowledge of the database and I am struggling to find any examples of this kind of dynamic building and binding.

We will also need to do the same thing with detail pages but this is easier as I can generate a XML stream on the server and send it to the silverlight client app to parse so that I can dynamically build the detail forms.

Regards,

Mark

The scenario is already supported by using DataPresenter manual generated column. This way, you could manually mapped the table data field with the DataPresenter. This topic has been discussed on the DataPresenter documentation on the article Auto Generate Columns vs Manual Generated Column.

A walkthrough for generating columns manually has also been provided in the article Walkthrough: Configuring Columns Manually.