CRUD scaffolding and trees

Question

Every time you read the introduction to an MVC web framework, you meet the same things: just describe your data classes and viola - you get auto generated administrative interface. Even Microsoft finally released its Dynamic Data.

In general, that's great. I was making (simple) sites for a couple of years and CRUD was all the customer wanted most of times.

Howerver sometimes the user's story contains requirements for "nested production categories of arbitary deepness" or like that. In such cases, I added the parent_id attribute to a data class and a possibility to filter out data items of a certain parent item.

Are there examples of CRUD interfaces supporting Key-ParentKey relationships out of the box? What do you guys think about this?

Answer 1

CRUD is never going to support everything that you need right out of the box. The best you can hope for is that it will get you half way there and from then on you are on your own.

There is a project that I am working on, and while CRUD will do most of the magic, I had to write my own code to handle other aspects as they were not handled automatically.

Basically what you want is something that will aid you in developing a new application, but at the same time will get out of the way and let you do what you have to do.