Hi all,

Sorry if this has been asked before.  I'm just trying to make sure I understand the purpose of the edDataSource.  It's there simply for design time binding, so I can attach it to a GridView, for example, and see the effects while designing.  I've been able to create a test project and see collection choices in the smart tag for the esDataSouce.  It seems you can only pick one, so I assume anything more complicated needs to be done via code (like in esSelect for example).  Am I understanding the esDataSource correctly, or am I missing something?  Thanks.

In general what you stated is correct. The esDataSource handles creating the markup of the bound control based upon the schema you select via smart tag. If you are using Sql2005 it can also handle autosorting and autopaging. There should also be some basic usage samples in your EntitySpaces install folder as well.

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Regards,

Scott Schecter
EntitySpaces | My Site

You can choose all of your columns in design time of course, and make the layout pretty nice. We also make it very easy to do other things, however, with ES2008 (Release Candidate and on) you basically only have to add esSelect and it will do paging, sorting, and set the count for you. It will even Delete and Update for you without you having to write any extra code as well.

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Thanks Mike, appreciate the response.  Am I correct in my assumption that you can only pick columns from 1 collection using the smart tag?

Yes, the esDataSource does not build joins on the fly for you. However, you can easily layout the main columns and add the extra bound columns manually and load it via a join, or create an Entity from a view. I hope that makes sense.

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EntitySpaces | Twitter | BLOG | Please honor our Software License

Yup, makes perfect sense.  That's kind of what I thought you'd have to do, but I wanted to make sure I was understanding it correctly.  Thanks.