Dynamic Data

With this post, I intend to leave a trace of the specs of this blog. I started this project in 2008 and never publicly mentioned it. Codename is Ichigo, named after Kurosaki Ichigo, the main character of the manga series Bleach by Tite Kubo. There’s no particular reason for the reference—I just like the manga. Since then, the blog has been a playground to experiment with technologies, including Entity Framework, Dynamic Data, URL Routing, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, @font-face, and OAuth. ...

Sometimes you need to schedule tasks in ASP.NET and save both a Start Date and an Interval, stored respectively as DateTime and TimeSpan.Ticks in your database. Editing raw tick values is not exactly good UX, so I bound the proper MetaColumn to the proper UIHint. After some tests, I noticed the GUI was functional but not as intuitive as expected. The solution was to customize the FieldTemplateUserControl of Dynamic Data, to display and save multiple columns I needed (Start Date, Start Time, Occurs – Daily, Weekly, Monthly, etc.). ...

Note (2025): This article dates back to 2008 and refers to ASP.NET Dynamic Data, which is legacy today. Concepts can still be useful historically, but for modern .NET consider newer frameworks and data‑binding approaches. The following snippet customizes the .NET ConnectionString at runtime in a Dynamic Data application. Edit Global.asax and modify the RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) method. Instead of: model.RegisterContext(typeof(XYZDataContext), new ContextConfiguration() { ScaffoldAllTables = true }); Use: model.RegisterContext( () => new XYZDataContext(connectionString), new ContextConfiguration { ScaffoldAllTables = true } ); Where connectionString is your string value. You can customize the RegisterRoutes parameter collection without compromising application functionality. ...