UI Patterns for ASP.NET MVC

Question

MVC practically begs to create pages that are organized into clear areas of responsibility. So instead of a single page with two or three editable grids that allow in-line changes to their lists, in MVC one is more likely to get a specific edit page per line item per grid.

For that matter one is very unlikely to see the type of page that has multiple editable grids thrown on it. Is there a good UI pattern to take the place of multiple editable lists/grids on a classic asp.net page?

I am guessing there would be some sort of taxonomy with categories of editable "stuff" that's displayed in a sidebar (perhaps) which then leads to a page with one grid grid or list per entity type. And clicking on an edit per line item would drill down further into a detail edit page.

I am mainly curious if anyone has seen good UI examples that simplify the taxonomy and organization of these lists. Most likely this sort of paradigm is found in administrative parts of sites I suspect.

Answer 1

Platforms, such as ASP.NET webforms or ASP.NET MVC are really means to an end here. They shouldn't set the UI paradigm, they should just help you get there.

Answer 2

There is no reason you couldn't have multiple grids on a page. With MVC you can also have multiple forms on a page. And if you do things right you will most likely use the concept of subcontrollers to build out your page areas to make your over all site easier to work with. You can post grid updates to an ajax handler. You could possibly submit multiple grid data to one controller if you wanted too...and then farm out the work of saving it. There is no reason to not have pages like you used too. MVC just requires that you are more creative with how you handle processing the data to keep things clean!

Answer 3

StackOverflow is the best example I know of. It uses tags as the taxonomy organization metaphor, gives you lists based on these tags, and then allows you to drill down into any one item (which itself contains lists of items).