Hybrid Data Drilling in Intersoft’s stand-alone Presenter

Hi again,

In the previous post, i mentioned that we have two data drilling concepts which are:

• Synchronized Data Drilling
• Hybrid Data Drilling

In this post, i’ll discuss the second concept first which is Hybrid Data Drilling in Intersoft’s stand-alone Presenter which are Icon Presenter, List Presenter and Grid Presenter along with your custom view that implement IDataPresenter interface later on.

Hyrid 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)

Hybrid Data Drilling is a concept where you can drill down a hierarchical data into a different kind of data representation, you can have Icon Presenter for the root level, Grid Presenter for the first level, List Presenter for the second level and so on. Furthermore with the architecture provided by Intersoft Presenter™ you can make your Custom Presenter to be part in this Hybrid Data Drilling concept.

I’ll discuss more about the extending your Custom Presenter a little bit later since the feature has not been implemented yet in this CTP but we already managed to get it done and its in testing phase.

To enable the Hybrid Data Drilling is very simple as we enable Synchronized Data Drilling in Presenter Manager. What you need to do is specify the ChildPresenter property.

Lets make Icon Presenter {Customers} -> Grid Presenter {Orders} -> List Presenter {Order_Details}.

• First of all you need to set up the Icon Presenter

Set up the Root Presenter

• Specify the Child Presenter for first level and second level.

Open the Root Presenter's Child Presenter collection

Add a Grid Presenter as its Child Presenter

Configure the Grid Presenter

Open Child Presenter collection for this Grid Presenter, and Add List Presenter as its Child Presenter.

Configure the List Presenter.

• You’ll get something like this in your XAML

Basically this is just the thing you need to enable the hybrid data drilling. However you also need to set up the DataSource control so it can provide our Presenter with the data.

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

Configuring Astoria Data Source

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

Specify the detail at each Data 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.

Set DataSourceID and DataMember

After this you can have the Hybrid Data Drilling feature in Intersoft Presenter 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.
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