How to view guest book entries.

Question

I am doing a guest book for my web site. The add guest book entry page is working fine.  Now I want to have a separate page for viewing entries that are already in the guest book.  No editing, just viewing.

The web page has a top section with navigation stuff, and a bottom section with contact info.  The Guestbook view should be in the middle between the two. I'd like to use read only text boxes for displaying the db stuff, and labels for the rest.

The issue is how do I create a variable number of entries?  There could be 20 guest book entries, or there could be 2, or there could be 200. How do I do this?

I thought about using GridView.. but examples I see shows each entry in the db table occupying one line.. what I want is something like this :

Date : September 14, 2009
Name : Joe Smith
Comments : Hi there my name is Joe and I am leaving some comments here. 
                    Nothing really going on.  Just a bit confused about how to load a variable
                    number of guest book entries on to a web page.

return to top (this is an anchor)

Date : ..
Name : ..
Comments : ..

return to top ..

etc.

Suggestions?

TIA

Answer 1

Looks as if I figured it out.  It may not be the most elegant solution, but it seems to work.. and I understand it.

By number of entries  I meant that the number of entries that are in the guest book are variable. This depends on how many people have signed it.  So the number of entries that are shown on the view guest book page depends on how many people have signed the guest book.

The way I solved this was first to include a html span on the web page. As in :
<!-- start guest book entries -->
<span id="GBentries" runat=server></span>

Then I used a data reader (I like data readers because I'm old fashioned) to load only the date, name, and comments out of the data table. There's a lot more data in there, but I only want to display these items.  As in :
  private int getGBentries() {
    int rows = 0 ;
    string cmd = "SELECT Date, Name, Comments FROM dbo.Guest" ;
    using (SqlConnection gconn = new SqlConnection(dbConn))
    {
      try {
        gconn.Open() ;
        SqlCommand Scmd = new SqlCommand(cmd, gconn);
        SqlDataReader dr = Scmd.ExecuteReader() ;
        while(dr.Read()) {
          GuestEntry ge = new GuestEntry((DateTime)dr["Date"],
                            (string)dr["Name"],(string)dr["Comments"]) ;
          entries.Push(ge) ; // build a stack to be used later
          rows++ ;
        }
        dr.Close() ;
        gconn.Close() ;
        return(rows) ;
      } catch {
        return(0) ;
      }
    }
  }

As each item was read in a string object was appended with a new html table to hold that particular entry.  As in :
  private void buildEntries() {
    foreach (GuestEntry ge in entries) {
      guestOut +=
        "<table width=800 cellpadding=8>\n" +
        "  <tr><td colspan=2><hr /></td></tr>\n" +
        "  <tr>\n" +
        "    <td width=200>Date</td>\n" +
        "    <td width=600>" + ge.getCommentDate().Date + "</td>\n" +
        "  </tr>\n" +
        "  <tr>\n" +
        "    <td width=200>Name</td>\n" +
        "    <td width=600>" + ge.getName() + "</td>\n" +
        "  </tr>\n" +
        "  <tr>\n" +
        "    <td width=200>Comments</td>\n" +
        "    <td width=600>" + ge.getComment() + "</td>\n" +
        "  </tr>\n" +
        "</table>\n" ;
    }
  }

Then the string was written out to the span id on the web page. As in :
  protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {
    getGBentries() ;
    buildEntries() ;
    GBentries.InnerHtml = guestOut ;
  }

Answer 2

by saying number of entries, do you want the number of entries in the Guestbook or the number of entries to that page?

the number of entries in the guestbook is easy, use databindNavigator it will give you all the data you return for you to manipulate and also you can know how many entries or more truly to say how many rows you have...

for number of entries to page you need  a counter control that you can download all over