C H A P T E R  6

Implementing Summary Lists

Summary lists (see Figure 6-1) are designed to enable users to quickly locate and identify a record of a given type among the existing data in the system. After they have found the record, they can then drill down to the record to view it in detail and, potentially, edit it.

Instead of requiring the full record for each item in the list to be sent to the client, summary lists generally only request and display enough data from the server to enable the user to identify the record they wish to view/edit. After the user has selected the record, the application will go back to the server and retrieve the remaining data for that record, and any associated and supporting data, to populate a details screen or data entry form. This is a common strategy for working with data in business applications, which minimizes the amount of data being sent to the client from the server, and facilitates a drill-down approach for interacting with the detailed data.

In this chapter, we'll consume data from the ProductSummaryService domain service that we created back in Chapter 4, and populate a DataGrid or a ListBox with the list of ProductSummary entities that it returns. We'll then look at ways of filtering, sorting, grouping, and paging the data in the summary list, and enable the user to drill down on a particular item.

Figure 6-1. A summary list