Need direction in creating an application which generates a crud form

Question

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone knew of any way i can implement an application which will do the following.

1. Allow a user to specifiy a connection string to a sql db
2. Allow a user to specify a table in the db
3. Allow a user to specify columns from the specified table
4. Generate Views, a Controller with Crud methods, & Data access code on the fly for the specified table columns in a subdirectory on the current web app.

I'm aware that there are apps that currently do this (such as sharepoints list creation stuff), but i'd like to see how this was accomplished and recreate it for my own learning purposes.

Thanks alot for any help

Answer 1

Take a look at Microsoft's take on scaffolding, also, some time ago I was developing a taxonomy app and found this meta data model in codeproject

Edit: another cool SO link

Answer 2

Have you check out SharpArchitecture?

Anyway I fiddle with MVC 2 based AutoCrud when I'm not saving the world from aliens so I can give some pointers and point to things to check out:

• Become familiar with how MVC 2 can auto scaffold up your edit screens
• Understand that you'll have to pass "meta" information about your models somehow. In MVC 2, this is called ModelMetadata.
• Tackle how to display related or associated models in aggregate root or parent screens
• Learn how to generate code, and inspect ddl schema or meta information with T4 templates.

Thats all I can think off for now. This is not an easy task and a comprehensive answer is probably enough to fill a book.