Saving/editing parent and child information on same webpage

Question

This is a question related to how people are handling a situation in the user interface for a web application. I have a page which is displayed when a user wants to create/edit a Parent object. It has a few attributes related to this Parent object, as well as a Save button so the Parent can be saved. Each Parent object has a collection of Child objects (displayed in a grid on the same page), and on this same screen the user can add/modify/remove Child objects, similar to the following:

Parent Information:

ParentName:   [textbox]
ParentDate:   [datepicker]

Children Information:

ChildName      ChildDate       Delete
[textbox]      [datepicker]    [button]
[textbox]      [datepicker]    [button]
[textbox]      [datepicker]    [button]

[Add Child button]

[Save button]   [Cancel button]

Notice that I really want to only have buttons when I need to: one Save button (to rule them all!). I am trying to enable the following scenario when the user is creating or editing a Parent object:

1. The user modifies Parent information (nothing saved to database yet)
2. The user adds/modifies/removes Child objects (nothing saved to database yet)
3. The user clicks Save (and all Parent and Child information is saved)

Through all kinds of fancy AJAX-ish stuff I can make this happen without page refreshes, but I am saving all the intermediate changes to the into the user's session on the web server each time in the meantime. For example: the user clicks "Add" button (to add a new Child object), so I go into the session, retrieve the Parent object I already had put there and add a new Child to the collection of Child objects, then bind this to the datalist. The next time the "Add" button is clicked, I have to save off the changes the user made to the first Child entry back into the object I retrieved from the session and repeat the process.

Is this crazy? Maybe I am trying to force "state" onto a "stateless" web application and shouldn't be doing that. I understand the concept of having per-lineitem editing in a grid, but that just seems silly for small screens where there's a couple of pieces of info for the Parent, a couple for each Child, and it's a lot of extra clicking for the user.

I think this question is technology independent, but just in case you need to know this is an ASP.NET web app.

Answer 1

I've done this sort of dynamic form generation work before also, and I tend to not save any of the user's input to the session. Sure, I'll query the server to ask about an object, but I won't expect the server to save any state information until I'm ready to post the form.

I don't think you're crazy, you're using a dynamic form and that's OK!