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New Message on MumbaiUserGroup
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From: Swapnil_B1
Message 1 in Discussion
The Wizard Control in ASP.NET 2.0
The ASP.NET Wizard control simplifies many of the tasks associated with
building a series of forms to collect user data. The control provides a
mechanism that allows you to easily build the desired wizard as a collection of
steps, add a new step, or reorder the steps. You don't have to write any
infrastructure whatsoever for navigation or to persist user data between steps.
Using the Wizard Control
A Wizard control is made up of four main parts: header, view of the current
step, navigation bar, and sidebar. All of these constituent parts, and much
more, can be styled using a number of properties. The contents of the header,
sidebar, and navigation bar can be further customized through the templates.
To use the Wizard controlthe <asp:Wizard> elementyou follow these simple
steps: drop a Wizard control onto your Web Forms, add constituent controls,
images, and text to each wizard step, and access the wizard's data between
steps.
The Wizard control is a composite control that inherits from the
CompositeControl base class and gets integrated designer support from Visual
Studio 2005. It posts back to itself to maintain view state information. This
fact alone allows for nonlinear navigation and guarantees that form elements
are automatically repopulated across multiple views of the wizard procedure.
Each step in a wizard is a sort of panela container of text, markup, images,
and custom user controls.
Adding Steps to a Wizard
The <WizardSteps> block gathers all the defined steps in which the wizard
procedure is articulated. The WizardSteps collection can be edited visually
through the property dialog. You can add two types of steps to the collectiona
simple wizard step or a templated wizard step. In the former case, you add a
WizardStep control; in the latter case, an instance of the TemplatedWizardStep
control is added to the page. The two-step controls work in a similar manner
and accept a collection of server controls defined explicitly.
<asp:wizardstep runat="server" steptype="auto" title="One step">
<div>
<!-- any controls go here -->
</div>
</asp:wizardstep>
The contents of a WizardStep can be dynamically adjusted and steps can be
programmatically added or removed as you please. However, to allow for further
customization, TemplatedWizardStep can be used instead of WizardStep, allowing
users to change the content and navigation templates within it. By default, you
can only have three different navigation templates: start, step, and finish.
Using TemplatedWizardStep allows you to have different navigation buttons on
each of the steps.
Here's how you define a templated step:
<asp:TemplatedWizardStep runat="server" steptype="auto">
<ContentTemplate>
<!-- any UI goes here -->
</ContentTemplate>
</asp:TemplatedWizardStep>
The <ContentTemplate> element corresponds to an instance of an object that
implements the ITemplate interface. This object gets or sets the template for
displaying the content of a page in the Wizard. It goes without saying that you
can define or change the template programmatically. In addition, a templated
wizard step control lets you modify the navigation bar through a template:
<asp:TemplatedWizardStep runat="server" steptype="auto">
<ContentTemplate>
<!-- any UI goes here -->
</ContentTemplate>
<CustomNavigationTemplate>
<asp:Button Runat=Server Text="My Button" />
</CustomNavigationTemplate>
</asp:TemplatedWizardStep>
By adding a <CustomNavigationTemplate> block you can take full control of the
navigation usually displayed at the bottom of the current view. You normally
fill the <CustomNavigationTemplate> block with a series of buttons, but other
controls are acceptable as well, with the restriction that those controls must
support command bubbling, as does Button.
A wizard step is just one of the forms in which you break up the original user
interface to build the wizard. So a wizard step will typically contain input
controls such as text and checkboxes, dropdown lists, calendars, validators,
and whatever else you can use to collect data from users.
All step classes inherit from the WizardStepBase class. The base class provides
each child class with a property named StepType. The property gets or sets the
type of navigation buttons to display for a page in a Wizard control. By
default, the type of a step is dynamically determined by the control. The first
step is a Start step, and the last is the Finish step; unless specified by the
user, the control doesn't automatically assign steps to be Complete steps. All
other intermediate steps are ordinary steps. The main difference between the
step types is in the list of buttons displayed in the navigation area. An
ordinary step allows a user to move back and forth, whereas a Start step
doesn't display a Back button, and a complete step doesn't provide any
navigation whatsoever. As mentioned, all these built-in rules can be altered if
you use a templated solution.
Swapnil (Swaps)
http://swapsnet.spaces.live.com/
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