Introducing PageMethods
Linking to a web page is very easy, both in simple HTML and in ASP.NET.
Linking to a page that really exists, passing the right parameters, and parsing
these parameters, is a bit different.
The problem
Let's take a simple example. You want to call a page that displays
information about a customer. The page expects a customer ID. Let's say that ID
is an integer.
Here is how a URL to call such a page would look like: http://myserver/Customer.aspx?CustID=12
If you're not the developer who created the page, how do you know the name of
the parameter? How do you know the type of this parameter?
Either you have to look deep in the code of the page you want to invoke (do you always have that
code at hand, by the way? Not so sure), or you look in the documentation related
to that page (does such documentation exist? Is this documentation up-to-date?
Did Joe update the documentation when he quickly renamed the parameter from
CustID to CustomerID?).
This gives you an idea about the limitations coming with the default way of
linking or redirecting to a page. But let me give you some more insight about
other limitations:
- you refer to a page by its file name (No check at compile time, so if you
make a mistake, you'll know only when someone tries to access the page. This
means that you're never sure what you deliver is 100% safe. When you realize
you've made a mistake, it's late and you have to redeploy the application
after fixing the problem)
- you never know for sure what parameters or combinations of parameters each
page expects
- you have to know the exact name of each parameter
- you pass parameters by concatenation of strings (this is work, code is not
easy to read, and not nice)
- you have to parse and convert parameters by yourself (in ASP.NET,
parameters passed on URLs are available through Request.QueryString, only as strings)
- a page must validate the parameters it receives (Check parameters are not
null. Is the type of each parameter correct? Are the parameters within the
range of valid values?)
The solution
PageMethods takes care of your URLs. It proposes a
solution to define structured URLs for each of your pages, as well as a clean
and simple way to call them.
The idea is based on strict page inputs and declarative parameter binding.
With PageMethods, each page exposes a set of methods that represent
the different ways to call the page.
All you have to do to start benefiting from sharp URLs is to add methods to your pages, and mark these methods with
attributes provided by PageMethods.
Here is how the code for a Customer page would look like:
Solution comparison
A bit of code tells a lot, so let's compare the source code for the PageMethods
solution and for the standard solution.
Here is how the code for a page expecting two parameters can look like with
the standard solution:
Here is how the code for the same page looks like with PageMethods:
Now, here is how we would get a link to this page with the standard
solution:
... and with PageMethods:
That already tells a lot...
You can quickly get a deeper overview on how PageMethods
is used by reading the tutorial.
You can also decide to learn more about the features and benefits.