Chapter 10: Creating a Guestbook

Overview

Guestbooks are common features of personal Web sites; they provide a place where visitors can enter their thoughts about your site or about the world at large. A guestbook also happens to be a good way to illustrate the basics of using Microsoft ASP.NET Web pages for data entry. In this chapter, I ll show you how to use the tools in Web Matrix to create code for entering new records into a database. I ll show you a couple of tricks for customizing the MxDataGrid control introduced in Chapter 9. I ll explain how you can use the validator controls in Web Matrix to quickly and easily check user input on your pages. I ll also discuss some security issues you need to know about when creating a data-entry page and show you how to protect your application from people who might try to enter malicious data into your pages.

Figure 10-1 shows a guestbook page similar to the one we ll be working on in this chapter.

Figure 10-1: A guestbook entry page.

Naturally, visitors will want to see the comments in the guestbook. Allowing visitors to view the comments affords an opportunity to play around a bit with how to display data. In this chapter, you ll create a quick- and-dirty page to display guestbook entries. (In Chapter 11, I ll show you more flexible ways to display the guestbook.) The quick-and-dirty display of the guestbook that we ll create will look like Figure 10-2.

Figure 10-2: Viewing guestbook entries.