K2 Smartform is a rapid development tool that provide a WYSIWYG interface. There’s a lot of plus point to this as this closely resemble the visual studio designer or even dreamweaver and K2 have place alot of thought in the Smartform product design and a whole lot of controls are available out of the box.
However, the downside here is that since the K2 Smartform only work within the K2’s technology ecosystem, to extend the capability of the Smartform such as cooking your own controls or even using those commercially available (e.g. Telerik) are limiting.
In this article, we will be writing a mulit part series to show you guys how to build your own custom control.
Setup
The K2 Smartform is design such that its almost similar to any custom user control on ASP.NET or Sharepoint Webpart in terms of architecture.
To get started building a K2 Smartform custom control, head over to the following url and install the template that the community have release to help everyone get started.
Download the respective template and install for your version of Visual Studio. The “good” guys at the community have cater for different version of Visual Studio.
Getting Started – Creation of the K2 Smartform Control Project Solution
Now, let go about creating a new project. You should have a new category for the option on the left which is named K2.
Expand the K2 and select K2 Extension. Now choose Custom Smartform Control Project and give it a project name.
This should generate a Visual Studio Solution Project for you.
Generating the K2 Smartform Control Files
Let’s go generate some files for the custom control that we are going to build.
Right-Click and select Add New Item.
Choose SmartForms Basic Client Control Item and give it a name. (This should be the name of the control).
Your Visual Studio Solution Explorer should look like below.
