Chapter 13: Case Study Part 1: Extending Your Web Application

Overview

In this chapter, we're going to begin to allow interaction with our website. As it's a site for a band, we want to develop a sense of community with our fans so that they feel as if they "belong" when they use the website.

To provide this interactivity, we're going to develop a guest book for users. Users will be able to come to the website and post comments for other users and band members to view and respond to.

In creating the guest book in this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Using a datagrid for the guest book entries

• Customizing the grid so only the required columns are shown

• Adding custom text formatting to the grid, so that our user text is formatted correctly

• Creating a separate component, or custom class, where we can put the formatting code, so it can be use in more than one page

Most of this has been covered in earlier chapters, so what we're doing here is showing you how to bring it all together. Let's start by looking at what we need for our guest book.