Chapter 6 Rich Page Composition

Overview

A large number of Web sites these days contain similar-looking, rich pages that share the same graphics, appearance, user interface (UI) widgets, and perhaps some navigational menus or search forms. These pages are rich in content and functionality, are visually appealing, and, more important, have an overall look and feel that abides by the golden rule of Web usability: be consistent. What's the recommended approach for building such pages and Web sites?

One possibility is wrapping these UI elements in user controls and referencing them in each page. Although such a model is extremely powerful and produces modular code, when you have hundreds of pages to work with, it soon becomes unmanageable. Both classic ASP and ASP.NET 1.x provide some workarounds for this type of issue, but neither tackles such a scenario openly and provides a definitive, optimal solution. ASP.NET 2.0 faces up to the task through a new technology master pages and basically benefits from the ASP.NET Framework's ability to merge a "supertemplate" with user-defined content replacements.

With themes, you can easily give the whole site a consistent (and, you hope, appealing) user interface and easily export that look from one application to the next. Much like Microsoft Windows XP themes, ASP.NET themes assign a set of styles and visual attributes to the customizable elements of the site. Themes are a superset of cascading style sheets (CSS) and are supported only in ASP.NET 2.0.

A recurring task in Web development is collecting user input by using forms. When the input to collect is large and pretty much articulated (in other words, easy to categorize), multiple forms are typically used to accomplish the task. The whole procedure is divided into various steps, each of which takes care of collecting and validating a particular subset of the expected data. This multistep procedure is often called a wizard. ASP.NET 2.0 introduces a new view control that makes building wizards a snap.

Overall, building rich pages is a much more approachable task in ASP.NET today than it was with previous versions. With master pages, you build pages based on an existing template of code and markup; with themes, you use skins to control pages and achieve visual consistency as well as profile capabilities. Finally, with wizards, you add rich functionality to pages.