>>Coming from a VFP desktop client background, with no real data-driven web design experience, I am studying ASP.NET UI design to see it I can learn this stuff...
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>>I always tend to experiment with Parent/Child presentation when learning a new UI platform, so that is where I have started... Thinking I should use ASP.NET 2.0, I am studying the various ways of architecting a UI form which containts a master list of Parent records, and then showing the related children rows in a second grid on the page when you click on a parent. Eventuall, even the child records are parents to other children, so I'll need to deal with that also.
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>>Think: Customers with Open Orders / Open Orders for Selected Customer / Line Items on Selected Open Order... like this screen where I built the same thing in WPF: http://www.twitpic.com/26w26
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>>Some of techniques I've seen simply creates a plain old-shcool table of href links for the parents, with some method call to query the children based on the selected parent, while some techniques I've seen use the ASP.NET 2.0 data controls to work all this out. Are the ASP.NET 2.0 data controls cheating? Do real developers use these out-of-the box controls, or do the real pros output their own HTML so they can have more control?
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>I'd guess most of us are either using the stock controls but subclassed w/various customizations or third party controls. I'm using the controls from Telerik - they're much nicer than the stock controls.The reality is that I don't use any of the native data access or data binding provided by ASP.NET. It's "good enough" for quick and dirty stuff but the second you want just that one additional thing that makes it nicer for your users (or yourself) it suddenly gets really complex.
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>As far as what UI metaphor to use for parent/child items I've gone through this more than once and I'm slowly figuring out that, unless it's a really simple page, I really dislike in-place editing of grids (even w/third party controls). At some point it gets complex enough where I really wish it was it's own page. So now I'll use a hybrid approach - a grid of the master records w/a button or link that opens or navigates to another page for editing. Detail records shown the same way - a grid w/buttons or links that navigate to another page for more detail and/or editing. I'll populate the child list as they click on parent items.
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Many VFP developers have similarly thrown up their hands in frustration after working with editable grids. Jim Booth likes to call them "the devil's own control" ;-) Evidently that is universally true of grids, not specific to VFP.