Rich Client UI

Moving on to the UI the final step in proving the traditional n-tier and DAL architecture is to have a WinForms application that references only the Business Logic layer. Throughout this p.o.c. I have only coded up the reading part of the DAL CRUD operation, the reason for that being one of brevity. I could of course go back and code up the full operation if I so desired, but in this case the p.o.c will remain just that.

I created a WinForms app and added a ListView control to Form1, setting the properties to detailed view and adding two columns. I then added a handler for the Load method of the form as shown below and added the code to read the assets from the database and display them on the “grid”.

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using BL;

namespace UIAssetTestHarness

{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Form1_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

        {
            // Load the grid with the asset data
            BLAssets assets = new BLAssets();
            List<UIAsset> assetsList = assets.GetAssets();
            foreach (UIAsset asset in assetsList)
            {
                ListViewItem item = new ListViewItem(asset.AssetTag);
                item.SubItems.Add(asset.Description);
                lstAssets.Items.Add(item);
            }
        }
    }
}

And that’s it. If I were to pursue this p.o.c any further it would be to code the BL layer as web services and have the UI consume those. I’ll be doing that later on.