I am working on a project that needs a new screen for bulk entry tasks. We have a few business scenarios coming up where we have people inputting 5 to 8 records of data at a time. I met with a few of our analysts last week and hashed out a rough outline of what they were looking for. About 10 times or so during the 30 minute meeting some form of the phrase 'kind of like excel' was mentioned. Our data entry personnel are familiar with excel and our analysts thought an excel styled grid would make a lot of sense. 'An excel grid with a Submit button’ was the phrase I had underlined twice in my notes.Â
I wasn't too worried about the grid's styling, but I wasn't quite sure what the best way to handle the 'bulk insert' requirement. Most of our other grids require an explicit mouse click to insert an item – and often times this click includes navigating the user to a separate page that is made to handle inserts. Of course for mass data entry tasks this can get a little old – tabbing through the cells is much nicer. So I took my notes back to my desk and started building a small prototype. You can check out the live demo to watch the grid in action. And a few of my implementation notes can be found under the screen shots below.
Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF, Opera) | Download
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Configuring the ListView
My excel styled grid only has one mode – bulk insert. It would also support mass updating as well, but for our use cases this is a one way data stream. I want to use the ListView because I like how the templates are structured, but the ListView doesn’t natively support bulk inserting data (the ListView supports defining an InsertItemTemplate, but the ListView will only render this template once – so this template isn't useful for my scenario). I decided I would try using the regular ItemTemplate, but render elements that support editing instead of the usual read-only controls (i.e. TextBox's instead of Labels). I still use the Bind syntax because I want 2 way databinding, but because I am using the ItemTemplate for an insert scenario I will be responsible for telling the ListView when my data needs to be moved out of the controls and back to my data source. Below is the markup for my ListView.
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Setting Up My DataSource
Next, I setup my data source. For this example I am using the ObjectDataSource control. When my data source is first bound to the ListView, I want to render placeholder objects for 8 records (i.e. I want my grid to show 8 empty rows by default). So when my Select method fires, I return a collection that contains 8 Customer objects that have their property values set to their default values (null strings for my example).
Next, I handle the Submit button's click event handler and loop through all of the ListViewDataItems and invoke the ListView's UpdateItem function which will cause the Update method on my ObjectDataSource to fire – moving the data back out from the controls and back into memory. Finally, after the data is moved back to memory, I persist the batch to the database (for the demo I am persisting it to memory, but when this page goes live it will obviously be put in the database).
To make sure I don't persist records with all empty values, I added a validation check to my Customer business object that makes sure the object has at least one data value before the row is submitted. If validation passes, I move the customer data into the database.
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Toggling the DataTable’s Skin
For a bit of flair I included a couple of radio buttons for changing the grids theme from the default 2003 style excel shown below (found a nice article here on creating this skin) to the 2007 version which is a bit softer (see screen shot at the beginning of the article).Â
To change the grids skin I attached event handler’s to the radio button’s click events and use the Sys.UI.DomElement.addCssClass and removeCssClass to toggle the CSS class that is applied to the grid. Below is the JavaScript that does this bit of work for me.Â
That's it. Enjoy!
Windows only: Popular freeware anti-virus application AVG Free recently updated to AVG Free 2008. Aside from a general interface overhaul and faster performance, the updated anti-virus scanner has added several new features with a focus on web security. AVG is always at the forefront of the freeware anti-virus category, so unless 
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension Next Tab adds an option to the right-click context menu to open a link in a new tab directly next to the current tab. If you’re the sort who’s still got 10 tabs open on a light day, you know how quickly your reading can get disorganized. Next Tab helps keep those tabs in context and next to the tabs from whence they were launched. Next Tab is free, works wherever Firefox does.
After you’ve installed nLite, load your installation CD into your disc drive and make sure you’ve got your 25-character product key handy. Launch nLite, click to the next screen, “Locating the Windows installation.” Before you go further, create a new folder somewhere on your computer, at the hard drive root (as in “C:”) if possible. Click “Browse,” select your CD drive, and you’ll be prompted to copy your CD to a folder. Select the folder you created, then wait for the copy to finish.
NLite’s next screen will ask what you want to customize on your install disc. If you only want to update to SP3, only click the “Service Pack” button. But unless you love answering questions and never touch a setting in Windows XP, you’ll want to flip all the switches green and click “Next.”
Now nLite will ask for slipstream files, or packages you want to integrate into the installer. You’ll always want to have the latest service pack available, since, for instance, Service Pack 3 incorporates the fixes made in SP1 and SP2, so it makes them unnecessary. If you grabbed the latest beta of nLite, you’ll see a Service Pack 3 already offered for integration, but it’s an older release candidate. Hit the “Choose” button, select the executable file you downloaded from Microsoft with the seriously long file name, and give nLite a few minutes to implement it. When you see the version number change, hit “Next” and move on.
"Hotfixes and Update Packs" is for all the tiny little Windows Updates between service packs. If you're including SP3, you can pretty much skip this part. But in the future, and for those not jumping onto SP3, I recommend running WinUpdatesList. You'll see a list of all the updates you've installed, and sorting by date and type should show you what you've installed since the last service pack. Right-click on an update, and you'll get a link to a related Microsoft Knowledge Base article, where you should be able to download the fix directly and patch it into nLite. You can also roll executables for Windows updates—like 
You start really making your XP system your own on the next screen. The “Compatibility Window” that pops up can protect you from yourself; unless you’re sure you can do without an item, you’ll want to leave it checked. Behind it, the “Remove Components” section is where you can pull out all the stuff you don’t ever use or don’t have. Most of the savings are small in hard drive size, but keep your system from clogging with services and drivers it doesn’t need. Among the almost-guaranteed safe removals:”Briefcase” from Accessories; most of the non-red items in Hardware; Keyboards and Languages that you don’t ever plan to use; “Tablet PC” from Multimedia; and MSN Explorer and Windows Messenger from Network.
Up next is the “Unattended” section, if you checked it, and this one requires attention to detail. If you want to set and forget your XP install, change “Unattended Mode” to “Fully automated,” but then move slowly through every tab, filling in every section you’d expect to get prompted for during install. You can fill out your Product Key in advance here, and you’ll also want to check “Skip OOBE” (Out Of Body Experience, or the introduction tour). Fill out all the name fields in “Users” and “Owner and Network ID,” and make sure to set the time in “Regional.” Once you’re content you’ve pre-empted your installer, click “Next.”
You can pretty much leave the "Options" pane alone, although I enable the "merge" option by way of hoping for a smaller package. The "Tweaks" options are up next, and while I can't tell you how to customize your desktop, I'll note that you can basically set up your desktop, Start Menu, Internet Explorer and lots of other Windows tweaks from these prompts. Check the bottom bar for descriptions, and fear not—all of these can be undone, and we've posted a good many here at Lifehacker.
Hit "Next," and you're almost done—click "Yes" to start the bundling process. Once that's finished (about 7-10 minutes on a faster computer), you can click through to make or burn an ISO file. Before doing that, gather up any files you want to keep on the disc, like that finicky printer driver or your favorite app installers, and place them in their own folder in the directory where you copied your original XP CD to. Now hit “Make ISO,” choose where to save the image, and then burn it to CD or DVD using your favorite utility, like 
Our gadget-obsessed brothers at Gizmodo report that many AT&T hotspots—including Starbucks and Barnes and Noble—have started offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users. With a little ingenuity, the same free Wi-Fi access can be granted to your laptop. Using it from your iPhone, you just connect to the hotspot and give the site your iPhone number. To get the same access on your laptop, the key is to fool the hotspot into thinking your browser is still an iPhone. Here's how:
Now that you’re all set up with your spoofed iPhone user agent, head to the hotspot page and enter your iPhone number (or, if you’ve got permission, maybe the number of an iPhone owner you know).* Once you’re done, you should hopefully have free hotspot access from your full screen rather than your tiny iPhone screen.
VirtualBox makes virtual installations of Windows and other operating systems easier than you’d think in Linux (as mentioned in our