Hi,
In every project, i always build up data entry forms for the Entities. I have googled it a bit and found some controls like Peter's Data Entry Suite ... etc.
Do you ever use these kind of controls and could you please tell me your experiences about using them ?
Thank you
For web development I've always had positive experiences with Telerik.
At the end of the day it comes down to the classic build vs buy. Once upon a time I was consulting for a company and I came across a jr programmer my 2nd day there. Asked what he was working on and he was custom building his own date/calendar picker for ASP.NET. He was basically building something similar to peter's date picker or any other calendar control you find from 3rd party vendors.
Somewhat taken aback, I asked him how long he had been working on it. 3 weeks was the reply. Now fresh out of college, assuming 40k base salary + 15% overhead (probably low), this guy costs the company $920 a week. So $2760 in productivity costs for a subpar, unfinished date control that could be had for $250 off the shelf. In fact, the entire telerik package ran us something like $800 for a developer license last time we bought. Big waste of time/money rolling your own in that case.
After a little research we decided on the Peter Blum Data Entry Suite for the rebuild of the online application at TechInsurance.com and BusinessInsuranceNow.com. The project has been going on for over a year now. But I've been very pleased with Peter's suite. And his documentation and support is truly unparalleled.
So onto the project -- first of all, the online applications in the two sites are extremely dynamic. I mean, the application has to handle dozens of different business types and only ask questions that are relevant to the user. So this task is difficult in and of itself. But one issue in particular is the dynamic nature of each page individually. The site needs to show & hide questions dynamically based on answers to other questions on the same page. And of course the invisible questions need not be validated. So in the old (or shall I say current) versions of the site I handled all of this with carefully written javascript and server-side code. It was always absolutely critical that the Javascript followed the same rules as the server-side code so only the visible questions were required. But when dealing with applications of this magnitude I would occasionally make mistakes that would show their ugly face when a complex set of conditions were met.
Now, with the Peter Blum suite I can actually utilize the MultiFieldStateController, and the VisibleCondition inside an EnablerContainer to take care of all this logic in a declaritive fashion. When I do that the DES suite will actually handle both the client-side and server-side portions of this visibility and validation functionality. And that means I don't have to write a lick of Javascript. And I don't have to constantly test that my Javascript code is working the same as the server-side code because I know that the DES is taking care of it for me. This is just a small portion of the overall suite but this is the functionality that is the most useful to me by far.
For what its worth, I personally did not like using Peter Blum's controls. I have had generally positive experiences with Telerik over the past 4 or so years.