ASP.NET devs - how do you work admin systems?

[Izi]

gridviews / listviews are powerful and very useful controls, but what do you folks use for the more complex sections to your sites?

For example, take a news admin section which has multiple items related to it.

a news article may:

1) belong to multiple news categories
2) have an associated image gallery (or video)
3) may have more than 1 page of text
etc etc

So the gridview is great for editing smaller sections, but what do you do with sections which have multiple tables behind them? do you use the gridview to search / view items then put a hyperlink to a custom page to edit the item? Or do you use the details view to edit the item? Any help would be great

 

[Izi]

cool, didnt think to use the repeater.

another question: how do you all design your websites? do you seperate BLL and DAL or not?

If you do, do you use linq and ORM in DAL? if not what?

Am i right in thinking that the business logic layer should be the code which handles all the processing of data. IE the manipulation of data between server and user.

The data access layer litterally gives the BLL access to your datastore?

In the past i have always put BLL and DAL together. In my latest project I have seperated them, but want to make sure I am doing it right.

what other coding practices do you use?

 

[Izi]

For us the DAL holds the database to object mapping, and the basic objects themselves (we store most of the functionality in wrapper classes in the BLL).

akakjs

thanks for the reply.

so in DAL, you dont have any code for "Select * from x" ? all that functionality is in BLL?

 

[Izi]

Thanks for the replies.

I came across this post http://www.adamtibi.net/post/2008/08/23/LINQ-to-SQL-The-Data-Access-Layer-DAL-Shrinker.aspx which helped me make up my mind.

Akakjs - as for Linq to SQL being dead, i don’t feel that’s a big problem for us. If linq provides us with what we need, then why would this be a problem? If we come across a problem which we find linq isn’t adequate, then we can use custom SQL code.

I also read on another Microsoft blog that it wasn’t dead as such, and they would release updates for it (bug fixes) but they currently had no plans of building on it further. It doesn’t mean that they might pick up on it in future.

For us, linq is brilliant. We have to develop very quickly and linq helps us with that immensely.

Once again, thanks for the replies - its been informative!

 

[Izi]

also from that post...

"We are listening to customers regarding LINQ to SQL and will continue to evolve the product based on feedback we receive from the community as well."

seems to me if linq has a good enough following, it wont die. and because many companies have invested time in to learning the lanquage i dont see it going quietly. Just my 2p.