My last blog entry provided a list of commercial, third-party ASP.NET server controls I have used in past projects, along with a mini-review of each. Today I added another notch to the proverbial commercial ASP.NET server control headboard: DVXP's TEdit.NET.
TEdit, which stands for Table Edit, is a Web control designed to make viewing/editing/inserting/deleting data from a database table as easy as point-and-click. And it does a pretty good job at that. In past projects I've always extended the DataGrid in some manner to show, edit, delete, etc. data from a database table. TEdit.NET makes this job much easier, but does introduce a bit of a learning curve for those who have always used the DataGrid.
First, rather than specifying the “structure” of the grid in the ASP.NET page's declarative syntax, a separate XML configuration file is used. Furthermore, with TEdit.NET you need to provide either a table name, view, or stored procedure that has the data to bind to the grid. If, like me, you've spent the time to build up a rich middle tier with an assortment of business objects and classes that provide the data to the presentation tier, you're SOL, as far as I can tell - with TEdit.NET there's a tight coupling to the data model.
While this is an annoyance and a potential maintainance issue for large ASP.NET applications, I think TEdit.NET is a killer app for small applications. Once you get it set up you get, without writing a lick of code, the ability to:
- Sort data
- Search on data
- Page through data
- Edit data
- Insert data
- Delete data
- Cache data
Granted, the GridView and DataSource controls in ASP.NET 2.0 provide a lot of this out of the box, but with TEdit.NET I've found it amazingly easy to make an impressively nice-looking and very intuitive table editor with minimal effort.
TEdit.NET's usage and syntax is a bit different from the DataGrid's, so, as I mentioned earlier, there is a bit of a learning curve for those of us who have always used DataGrids to provide access to backend data. For example, there are different events and different “patterns” used for formatting the data in the grid, iterating through the records of the grid, accessing a particular record's column values, and so on. If you are familiar with DataTables, though, you'll likely find this learning curve to be quite flat, as TEdit.NET basically provides programmatic access to the DataTable that serves as the foundation of TEdit.NET's data.
If you have a smallish ASP.NET application where you need to create professional-looking interfaces for editing backend data, I'd highly recommend TEdit.NET. At $249.00 for a single server license, I think you'll find this control pays for itself in time saved within the first week.