Are there any alternative scaffolding frameworks to Asp.Net Dynamic Data?

Question

I have been playing around with Dynamic Data but I find the filtering and navigation aspects basically useless for but the simplest scenarios, even in preview 4. I specifically want to be able to handle hierarchical self-reference tables when editing the data.

Does anyone know of an open source project / or cheap alternative framework to getting similar out of the box functionality?

UPDATE: Dynamic Data allows you to easily hook up a L2S or EF class very easily by setting the global.aspx to use that context. You get basic dynamic navigation and filtering with crud features for whatever tables you have linked in your DBML if your using L2S. I am wanting to use it as a back end management tool.

Answer 1

Castle MonoRails :) For the closest asp.net Dynamic Data function like tool / framework or should I say it's the other way around since MonoRail was out before DD.

http://www.castleproject.org/monorail/

MonoRail was inspired by Ruby on Rails and that's what DD is inspired from.

EDIT:

I searched also and I don't know of any other DD like solutions out there that also support L2S / EF. In fact I didn't find any other DD like solutions for that matter besides MonoRail with ActiveRecord.

Castle MonoRail uses ActiveRecord which uses NHibernate. While NHibernate is not L2S or EF it is an ORM and in most opinion's (perhaps all) it is more mature at this point. Active Record's implementation does most of the heavy lifting for you from what I read so it will give you the best alternative to a DD like solution.

I think that's the closest you will get at this point if you don't want to use DD.

Answer 2

Tree-like self-referencing tables are difficult to handle no matter what. It gets even worth when you can have graphs, e.g. a node can have more then one parent. Then you have to think about if you can have cycles.

I therefore think you need a custom FieldTemplates, or custom PageTemplates.

So you could use a custom control for the Tree-like self-referencing relationships but use standard Dynamic Data to generate forms for all the simple fields. Or have a "hand written" page to edit the tree, then link to Dynamic Data to edit the simple fields on each node.

Sorry, I don’t think you will have a "off the shelf solution" solution, as the UI you need is so dependant on your application domain.