1.7. Wrapping Up

Dynamic Data is a flexible system for interfacing with data in an ASP.NET application. Featured benefits include full create, edit, update, and delete (CRUD) scaffolding — all available without code generation. Field templates allow you to encapsulate complex UI interactions and give you a single place to maintain validation controls and the presentation of data.

Although Dynamic Data's scaffolding is powerful, real extensibility is found in using the DynamicControl server control, which acts as a placeholder for field templates. The rich metadata layer placed on top of the database models allows the field templates to adapt to the context of the model.

In this Wrox Blox, you learned how to create custom field templates, implement custom business logic, secure the scaffolding, and make your data context available to all levels of your application.

In the future the ASP.NET team will extend Dynamic Data to allow integration with various types of data objects. You will be able to use custom CLR objects and classes generated from a number of O/R mappers and data access layers.