Hi all,

In the March 2009 CTP we introduce a declarative data drilling concept to Intersoft Presenter™. Data Drilling is one of the most wanted feature for a LOB application, so we thrive to make it easy to implement in our Intersoft Presenter™.

We have two main concepts for Data Drilling:

• Synchronized Data Drilling
• Hybrid Data Drilling

The Synchronized Data Drilling concept is implemented for Intersoft Presenter Manager, and the Hybrid Data Drillign concept is implemented for the Intersoft Presenters (Icon Presenter, List Presenter and Grid Presenter) along with other classes that implements IDataPresenter (which includes WebCoverFlow later on).

In this post, i’ll discuss the first concept first which is Synchronized Data Drilling in Intersoft Presenter Manager.

Synchronized Data Drilling

Pre-requisites:

• ADO.NET Data Service to Northwind Database is up and running.
  Since in this post I’m going to show you the sample using Astoria Data Source control.
  Click here to learn more how to establish Astoria Data Service (ADO.NET Data Service)

In Presenter Manager, when you drill down  a data or drill up to its parent, you’ll see the data visualized in the same presenter. So whenever you switch the visualiation in any level, if you go down or up , you’ll see the drill down / drill up data in the same visualiation (synchronized).

To enable the Data Drilling in Presenter Manager, you need to specify child presenter manager in a property called ChildPresenterManager

In the XAML you’ll see something like this:

Basically this is just the thing you need to enable data drilling. However you also need to set up the DataSource control so it can provide our Presenter with the data, and also you need to set up the appearance for each presenter that attached to Presenter Manager. Let start with configuring Astoria Data Source.

When you have ADO.NET Data Service up and running, you only need to specify the necessary information to Astoria Data Source as follows

Then you need to configure what are the data that you want to retrieve at each service level.

After you got the Astoria Data Source control configured, what you need to do is just set the Data Member and Data Source ID.

Lastly what you need to configure is the Presenter’s appearance. But i won’t go detail on this to make the topic more focus, so I’m just gonna give the binding field to Icon Presenter and List Presenter so you can see the data binding works.

Ok we almost finished. Just one more thing, the Presenters (Grid Presenter, List Presenter, IconPresenter) are going to be reused in each level, therefore we need to update the binding information when necessary so that it still display the correct data.

For example:

BindingTextField, in Customers level we might want to set it to ContactName, however in Orders level or OrderDetails we want to set it to another field. To do this we provide a feature called property setters.

In the XAML you’ll see something like:

After this you can have the Data Drilling feature in Presenter Manager enabled already. Try running your project and see what happens when you double click an item. You can grab my sample project from this link.

To Drill Up, you can click the indicator at the top left.

Important Notes

• When we request a data drilling (drill down) to ADO.NET Data Service, what its actually do is load parent with the specified ID then expand its child. E.g.    http://…./NorthwindDataService.svc/Customers(‘ALFKI’)$expand=Orders
• When you drill down all the previous structure history will be kept (Grouping, Column Reordering, Sorting)
  So let say you drill down to Orders from Customers (ALFKI), perform grouping, column re-ordering and sorting. Then drill up, select another customer then drill down , all the grouping, column positioning and sorting states will be kept. But of course its showing the new data.

That’s all for now.
I’ll dicuss the other Data Drilling concept in the next post.
To experience the real application i suggest you to go to http://sirius2.intersoftpt.com/presenter and explore the samples there.

Regards

Andry

Sample Link

Btw you can also incorporate your custom view to perform data drilling later on, by implementing our interfaces. Like what just we do to our CoverFlow. Here’s are some snapshot coverflow in action.