Five Cool Filters for Dynamic Data 4

Starting with the Range Autocomplete, Range & MultiForeignKey Filters from the old Dynamic Data Preview 4 Refresh, I have also added five of my filters:

1. DateRange
2. StartsWith
3. EndsWith
4. Contains
5. Where

I won’t go into much detail here as Oleg Sych has done this great series on DD4 filters, that pretty much explains it all for you.

• Understanding ASP.NET Dynamic Data: Filter Templates
• Extending ASP.NET Dynamic Data: Filtering with Joins
• Understanding ASP.NET Dynamic Data: Entity Templates

I am using the Ajax Control Toolkit for the date picker in the DateRange filter but other than that it’s not much different form the Range filter from the Dynamic Data Preview 4 Refresh sample.

!Important: One thing I would like to point out is that both Entity Framework and Linq to SQL have a small but important issue. This issue is the the “Contains” Expression used in the above filter of the same name is actually expressed as the “Like ‘%{0}%’” and so you DO NOT get full text search using “Contains”.

“Contains” when it was introduced in SQL Server 7 was given a big build up and to be omitted in EF and L2S is a big let down.

Some examples:

Figure 1 – DateRange, StartsWith, EndsWith, Contains, Where and AutoComplete filters

Figure 2 – Range and Multi Select Filters

I just thought that these filters would be useful for your tool boxes.

!Important: I can’t take credit for all the Expression helpers most come from the above mentioned Preview 4 that is no longer on the ASP.Net Codeplex site.

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Note I’ve included my five filters and the three filters from the Preview.

As always happy coding.