Posted on slxdeveloper.com was a question on how to create custom smart parts for SalesLogix Web Client. Now I like custom smart parts, so much so that I find myself eventually going there quite often. You might say this is counter intuitive as you should just ‘Set it and forget it’ with the OTB form editor and data binding capabilities. This is where I somewhat deviate on that thought process. I find that the forms editor makes for me anyways a great prototype starting point where you can get the UI set up just so. But after its setup I find myself happily in Visual Studio making edits to clean up the generated code or have the smart part inherit some further base class to provide a deeper level of functionality.
I will continue happily work in both environments and really focus on getting the work done for the customer.
I am with you on the fact that editing the logic is much easier with a custom smart part… the problem I have is that the UI code generated by the quick form is very heavy, confusing, poorly formatted and hard to change. Does it seem to you like most of the time it is easier to just throw away the generated code and start from scratch?
I find it depends on the type of smart part. If there is alot of customization that custom binding cannot handle then I do get down to gutting the smart part. Split it out into its constituent parts (.ascx and .ascx.cs) and then refactor so the code is much easier to handle. There are also lots of code that is there to handle the generic cases that can be factored down to some simpler property sets. An example is around the ChildInsertDialog action. Lots of work to basically just set some entity properties.