Alex Duggleby’s Palace of Words

I primarily use a GUID (uniqueidentifier) as my primary key data type. You never know when you need to synchronize your data, and I’d rather be prepared by using a GUID as a unique global identifier. Anyhow, it seems that the brand new Dynamic Data (released today as part of .net 3.5 Service Pack 1) does not really support a GUID as primary key.

The Entity Framework does not pass enough meta data to the Dynamic Data. When you use DD as a simple scaffold and add a record you will be greated with a textbox to enter the primary key for your record. Not sure about you, but I don’t have a GUIDGEN method in my brain, therefore I was looking for a solution.

There some talk of adding an attribute to the column in an inherited partial class in the forum, but that isn’t an option for large numbers of tables. So I though I’d come up with a simple solution with a little help of some jQuery goodness. (I’ve been doing a lot of jQuery lately and it’s I’m really starting to enjoy Javascript!)

My idea was to allow me to create a guid via a context menu in my dynamics data project. Like this:

You can implement the solution in your app in less than 5 minutes. You need to download

• the current jQuery version and
• this plugin for jQuery context menus and
• the listen plugin. Drop them in a js subdirectory of your project.

Then open your dynamic data project. You need to change 2 files:

1. Open Site.Master.cs and override the OnLoad method.

public partial class Site : System.Web.UI.MasterPage
{
    protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e)
    {
        if (Request.QueryString["genguid"] != null)
        {
            Response.Clear();
            Response.Write(Guid.NewGuid());
            Response.End();
        }

        base.OnLoad(e);
    }
}

2. Then go to Site.master and insert the following directly after .

<!-- Guid Fix -->
<script src="/js/jquery-1.2.6.pack.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/js/jquery.listen-1.0.3-min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/js/jquery.contextmenu.r2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
    $(document).ready(function() {
        // add a sticky listener to the click
        // event of all input elements
        $.listen('click', 'input', function() {
            // add a ctx menu to each input box that
            // creates a guid in the textbox
            $('input').contextMenu('ctxGuid',
            { bindings: { 'createGuid':
                function(t) { genGuid(t); } } });
        });
    });

    function genGuid(t) {
        $.ajax({
            url: location.href,
            type: 'GET',
            data: { genguid: 1 },
            dataType: 'text',
            timeout: 10000,
            error: function(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {
                alert('Error fetching guid: ' + textStatus + '/' + errorThrown);
            },
            success: function(guid) {
                $('#' + t.id).val(guid);
            }
        });
    }

-->
</script>

<div class="contextMenu" id="ctxGuid" style="display:none;">
    <ul>
        <li id="createGuid">Create GUID</li>
    </ul>
</div>
<!-- End Fix -->

Voila, you can now right-click on the primary key input textbox (or any input box for that matter) and let the server create a guid.

Hope it helps!