Wednesday, March 17, 2010

The Wonderful World of Wizards

It has been an exhilarating and somewhat exhausting spring here in Minneapolis; from 2+ feet of snow pack to clear yards and 60 degree sunshine in 2-3 weeks. Getting beta's underway has not been fast enough or clean enough for my impatient expectations. But that's why you have betas to find the stumbling blocks. While waiting to enhance as-yet unidentified pre-enhancement conditions, I have been working on a pet project to create web function wizards with more specific generation capabilities.

My first re-visitation to IWizard has resulted in a modest little wizard that will help you generate a HyperQuery web function. The HyperQuery control allows configuration of a REPORT.BUILD like query based web function.

The second undertaking turned out to be a lot more interesting and a lot more work. The BTO Inquiry Wizard allows you to select a business object, select from its available fields and generate a working inquiry with all the data access components and controls configured, and with a FormView containing single valued fields labels and textboxes, and GridView controls for each set.

The great part about wizards is, of course, that you can take the results and enhance the heck out of them. They provide RAD starts to developing your own web functions while still leaving you in total control.

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