Tuning Silverlight's DataForm

Question

I'm designing data-oriented application in Silverlight 3 and I'm wondering if is it worth using new DataForm control. It looks really awesome on PowerPoint slides but I have no idea how it is in real life.

I need to achieve following behaviours:

• group model's fields to areas, for instance separating groups using horizontal lines or naming group of fields,
• place 2 or 3 input controls in exactly one row, for example: country-dropdown, zip textbox and city textbox,
• multilingual validation errors,
• a few readonly fields in edit mode,
• posibility to hide fields in dataforms,
• displying a helper button for showing modal popup window with dictionary/grid view.

I'd like to build it using Prism and RIA services.

Has anybody any experience to share?

Answer 1

My favourite feature of the DataForm control is that it works "out of the box". That is, you can plug one on your user interface, bind it to your data classes, and have it working with a minimal amount of code. Of course you need to further tune both the behavior and the appearance of the form (by using attributes on the data classes and/or properties on the form control itself), but for feasibility studies or for early usage testing it is usually enough (and very useful) to have it working quickly with the default behavior.

By the way this is a good resource to get started with the DataForm: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Creating-Rich-Data-Forms-in-Silverlight-3-Introduction.aspx

Answer 2

I have tried using the DataForm in a couple of places in my current project. Spent several days tweaking the various properties and attributes on my classes and found that it never did quite work the way I wanted it to. The demos that are on the web look great but they don't have 'real world' scenarios and are incomplete. So, I wouldn't recomend the DataForm for complex scenarios.