Hi,
I have a form that's pretty large: about 30 fields, with some very long ones (user's notes for instance) and some can be of variable lenght (a variable-size list of books/title/author). The design calls for the edit view to be in a popup that edits sections of the form at a time. The page must also use ajax so that it never refreshes. Users are expected to work about an hour on the page and make edits to each form at a rate of 1 record per minute or so.
The by-the-book choice would be to use a formview with an updatepanel but I'm wondering if that's the best choice. I'm thinking about loading an empty page and, on document ready, using a jquery function to call a page method or a web service that returns a json object with all the data for a particular record and have another jquery function that clears and updates the form with the new json object. After the edits are validated on the client side first, an ajax call will then resend the json object via jquery to a page method or web service (what's best?) and if it passes a server validation script, send back the next object, and if it's not reply with an error. For the back-end, I'm thinking about creating an entity model and load 30 records at a time (what'd be a good number?) using linq to entity.
I'm concerned about performance, security and scalability and I'm interested some feedback regarding this formview alternative.
Thanks