R – Tuning Silverlight’s DataForm

silverlightsilverlight-3.0

I'm designing data-oriented application in Silverlight 3 and I'm wondering if is it worth using new DataForm control. It looks really awesome on PowerPoint slides but I have no idea how it is in real life.

I need to achieve following behaviours:

  • group model's fields to areas, for instance separating groups using horizontal lines or naming group of fields,
  • place 2 or 3 input controls in exactly one row, for example: country-dropdown, zip textbox and city textbox,
  • multilingual validation errors,
  • a few readonly fields in edit mode,
  • posibility to hide fields in dataforms,
  • displying a helper button for showing modal popup window with dictionary/grid view.

I'd like to build it using Prism and RIA services.

Has anybody any experience to share?

Best Answer

I have tried using the DataForm in a couple of places in my current project. Spent several days tweaking the various properties and attributes on my classes and found that it never did quite work the way I wanted it to. The demos that are on the web look great but they don't have 'real world' scenarios and are incomplete. So, I wouldn't recomend the DataForm for complex scenarios.

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