Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part–4)

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a DataSource without writing any code. You can write a small amount of code also to meet your requirement.

In my previous chapter “Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part – 3)”, I described you how to create a DataGrid of records to insert/update/delete records.

In this chapter, I will guide you to create a List and Details screen using LightSwitch. This will show you how to integrate two or more tables into a single screen. Also, we will discuss on some custom validation. These all steps are without writing any code. We will use just the tool to improve our existing application. Read to Learn more about it.

Background

If you are new to Visual Studio LightSwitch, I will first ask you to read the first three chapters of this tutorial, where I demonstrated it in detail. In my 3rd chapter, I discussed the following topics:

• Create the Editable DataGrid Screen
• See the Application in Action
• Edit a Record
• Create a New Record
• Validate the Record
• Delete a Record
• Filter & Export Records
• Customizing the Screen

In this Chapter, we will discuss on the “Editable Data Grid” screen. Read it and learn more about this tool before it get release.

TOC and Article Summary

In this section, I will Summarize the whole Article. You can directly go to the original article to read the complete content.

• Creating the List and Details Screen
  Here I demonstrated, how to create a List & Details Screen using Visual Studio LightSwitch. This section has a no. of images which will help you understanding the basic parts.
• UI Screen Features
  This part tells about adding, modifying, deleting, exporting and sorting mechanism for the DataGrid. If you already read my previous chapters, this will be easier for you to understand.
• Adding a New Table
  In this point you will just create a new table that we will use at later point of time.
• Creating the Validation Rules
  This steps demonstrates how to do some custom validation without writing code. These are some basic rules that you can set explicitly.
• Adding Relationship between two tables
  This is the main part of this tutorial chapter. Here we will see how to add relationship between two tables. We will discuss what are the problems available there too. You can’t create a 1 to 1 relationship but other relationships are available. Read to learn more.
• Creating the new List and Details Screen
  Here we will create a new screen again by deleting the existing one. This is for beginners and if you are experienced modifying the screen, no need to delete the existing one.
• Application in Action
  We will see the application in action. This point will clear all your confusion. We will see all the steps that we implemented here and will check if we covered everything.

Complete Article

The complete article has been hosted in SilverlightShow.net including the first part. You can read the them here:

• Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part – 1)
• Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part – 2)
• Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part – 3)
• Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part – 4)

As usual, never forget to Vote for the article. Highly appreciate your feedbacks, suggestions and/or any comments about the article and future improvements.

End Note

You can see that, throughout the whole application I never wrote a single line of code. I never did write a single line of XAML code to create the UI. It is presented by the tool template automatically. It has a huge feature to do automatically. From the UI design to add, update, delete and even sort, filter all are done automatically by the framework.

I hope, you enjoyed this chapter of the series a lot. Lots of figures I used here, so that, you can understand each steps very easily. If you liked this article, please don’t forget to share your feedback here. Appreciate your feedback, comments, suggestion and vote.

I will soon post the next chapter. Till then enjoy reading my other articles published in my Blog and Silverlight Show. Cheers…