Making Individual Tables Read Only – Dynamic Data

These are two thing you can do to make your table Read Only.

1. Add an attribute for instance the ReadOnlyAttribute or your own custom attribute
2. Using Routing to restrict access to the Edit or Insert pages

The first solution I covered in this article Writing Attributes and Extension Methods for Dynamic Data so I’ll just show the Routing example here.

// Setting a table to Read only
var visibleTables = from t in MetaModel.Default.Tables
                    where t.Scaffold == true
                    select t;

var readOnlyTables = new StringBuilder();
foreach (var table in visibleTables)
{
    var isReadOnly = table.Attributes.OfType<ReadOnlyAttribute>().
                     DefaultIfEmpty(new ReadOnlyAttribute(false)).
                     FirstOrDefault();

    if (isReadOnly.IsReadOnly)
        readOnlyTables.Append(table.Name + "|");
}

routes.Add(new DynamicDataRoute("{table}/{action}.aspx")
{
    Constraints = new RouteValueDictionary(new
    {
        action = "Edit|Insert",
        table = readOnlyTables.ToString().Substring(0, readOnlyTables.Length - 1)
    }),
    ViewName = "Details",
    Model = model
});

Listing 1 – Routing example.

[ReadOnly(true)]
public partial class Employee {}

Listing 2 – sample attribute.

In Listing 1 we see three things going on:

1. We get a list of visible tables using the Scaffold attribute to find out if the table should be shown.
2. Next we loop through the visible tables and if the table is set to ReadOnly then we add it to the readOnlyTables StringBuilder to build a list of read only tables (e.g. “Products|Customers”).
3. Build a route that constrains the these tables to only get to the Details page.

Note: That this route must appear before the default routes.

Happy coding and remember your a PC but for us coders I prefer the short lived “Live to Code and Code to Live”

Important: The only caveat here is that the Delete button still works. :( But you could catch that in Business logic if you didn’t want to edit each page.