Creating a Step-by-Step User Interface with the ASP.NET 2.0 Wizard Control: The Basics

The wizard - a standard user interface element in desktop applications - takes the user through a series of discrete steps in order to accomplish some task. A wizard step typically includes instructions, input controls, and an interface for moving between the wizard's steps (typically Next and Previous buttons, with a Finish button at the last step). Furthermore, wizards often include different steps depending on the inputs chosen in previous steps.

Wizards have typically been the domain of desktop applications, but have recently become more prevalent in web applications. In ASP.NET 1.x, developers who wanted to implement a wizard-like user interface would often use multiple Panel Web controls, one for each Wizard step. As they user progressed through the wizard by hitting the Next and Previous buttons, the appropriate Panel could be displayed (have its Visible property set to True), while the others hidden (have their Visible properties set to False).

ASP.NET 2.0 makes creating wizard interfaces a lot less work thanks to its new Wizard control. With the Wizard control, we can define a series of Wizard steps and specify the content - static HTML and Web controls - that belongs in each step along with the function of the step, whether it's the first step, one step in the series of steps, the final step, or a summary step to appear after the wizard has completed. The Wizard control automatically includes the appropriate navigation elements for each step, remembers the values entered into the Web controls in each step, and includes a rich event model from which programmatic logic can be added to perform the desired task upon finishing the wizard (among other tasks).

In this article we'll see how to use the wizard control to break up the steps involved in inserting a record into a database, although the concepts can be extended to any multi-step task. We'll focus on the basics in this article; a future article will examine more advanced features of the Wizard control. Read on to learn more!
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