AspGrid 2.5

AspGrid Object Reference
AspGrid Implementation Guidelines
AspGrid Object Model Diagram

Introduction

AspGrid is a server-side data-bound grid component. With AspGrid, you can create an in-place editing grid interface to your ODBC dtabase table in as little as 5 lines of ASP code.

The 6 lessons of this manual will show you step by step how to build powerful AspGrid-based Web applications.
 

Before we start...

The following tasks must be completed before you can start using the samples in this manual:
 
• AspGrid must be registered on your system via the REGSVR32 c:\<AspGrid Directory>\AspGrid.dll command;
• An IIS virtual directory must be created on top of the \Samples directory with the Execute permission enabled. The manual assumes that the virtual directory name is AspGrid;
• A system ODBC datasource name (DSN) must be created pointing to the file AspGrid.mdb which contains a sample MS Access database. We will be using this database in all our samples. This manual assumes that the DSN name is AspGrid.
 

Sample Data Model

As we just mentioned, all the samples in this manual are based on a simple MS Access database located in the file AspGrid.mdb. Let's take a look at this database.


 

There are only two tables in this database, Departments and Employee. The Departments table stores information on departments in some hypothetical company, and the Employee table stores information on the employees of that company. For the Employee table we have chosen to store an employee first and last names, department they work in, marital status code (1 - Single, 2-Married, 3-Divorced, etc) and whether they are fully vested (0 - not fully vested, 1 - fully vested).

There is an obvious one-to-many relationship between the two tables: each department can have multiple employees working in it. This relationship is enforced via the primary key/foreign key pair (Departments.id - Employee.DepartmentID) as shown on this entity-relationship diagram.



IMPORTANT: Note that both tables have an AutoNumber column (which is called an IDENTITY column in SQL Server). AspGrid can only work with tables that have an identity column (with the exception of read-only grids).

Identity columns help AspGrid uniquely identify each individual record in the table.

Identity columns are generally not the same as primary key columns even though they may coincide as they do in these two tables. The main difference between the two is that identity column values are always generated by the DBMS and primary key column values can be entered by a user. Another difference is that primary key columns can be of any type and identity columns are usually long integers (MS Access supports another type of identity columns, Replication ID, but AspGrid requires identity columns to be long integers).
 
 

We can now proceed to Lesson 1.