In the above example, when you choose a Category from the first dropdown list a call is made to the
PlaquesService.asmx web service
to retrieve and populate the Notoriety dropdown list. This all happens automatically in the background.
When a Notoriety is selected from the second dropdown list another call is made to the web service to retrieve and populate the Plaque dropdown list and when a
Plaque is selected the details of the selection is displayed.
Partial Rendering
Partial Rendering is a .NET technique that calls a server-side web service to retrieve data in the background and then presents it to the user without the whole client-side browser page refreshing.
Aesthetics and Performance
The results are not only aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but more importantly everything runs a lot quicker and is less resource hungry because only a small snippet of data is requested and transfered
on demand, eliminating the need to transfer and hold large datasets on the client-side browser.
Service Orientated Architecture (SOA)
This technique is also known as Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). Typically, the same web service will be re-used by many different pages on a website, encapsulating and separating the bussiness logic from the presentaion layer.