I'm working on a project to upgrade a Classic ASP implementation of ActiveLINC into .Net using the Component Enabler from Unisys, but am having problems when switching between mainframe databases.
The ASP.Net Web Controls (that are created as a result of the Component Enabler running) are easily dropped into ASP.Net and work as expected. But when I try to 'Bye' out of a screen and return to the login page to then connect into a different mainframe database, the first database is still used in the connection process and is where I subsequently get logged into.
This behaviour isn't present in the Classic ASP version of the ActiveLINC site, and I can't imagine that I wouldn't be able to switch databases like this... am I doing something wrong here!?
If you're using the standard Component Enabler output, each mainframe database is meant to be hosted as an individual website in IIS.
I've created a 'wrapper' website, that in it's basic form, contains a list of links to each individual 'mainframe' website, which allows me to achieve the sort of database switching I think you want. To make this work, I had to make changes to the generic Login.aspx page to accept username/password form values from my 'wrapper' site and then to use these as part of the login process. I also changed the generic Default.aspx to redirect any timeouts, logouts, etc. to my 'wrapper' site, but this will vary depending on your requirements.
Related
Can I have a ribbon button launch an aspx ( asp.net ) page? The aspx page needs to inherit authentication and authorization as the logged in Dynamics user.
You can execute custom JavaScript from a ribbon button allowing you to spin up a new browser window pointing at whatever you like.
To inherit security credentials you need to look at setting up federated authentication across both the CRM server and the custom website hosting the ASPX. As you can probably imagine this isn't a trivial task.
You could also look at dropping your website into the custom ISV folder as was the case with CRM 4. However, this approach has been deprecated in CRM 2011 and AFAIK is therefore no longer supported.
As #Konrad pointed out you won't be able to use the Data Service REST API (OData) from your custom web pages as the service is only accessible from web resources hosted within the CRM environment. Server-side you'll be fine against the Org Service.
If you can get away with doing what you need in a web resource I'd highly recommend it as it's a whole lot less work.
I'm not sure you can do that. A while ago, I put in an iframe that I linked to an outside web page and it worked as supposed to except for connecting to the organization data. I just couldn't make that work (I got impatient, to be honest and didn't try all too hard).
The resolution I deployed in the end was to run a web resource, which was run internally on the server, that communicated the data to an outside service.
I'm assuming that the same behavior will follow if you try to open windows/convey data in to/out from the CRM.
Currently using DNN 5.2.x and we are using only 1 portal on the site. We need to make a mobile version of the portal and eliminate most of the extra DNN stuff as info will be just displayed. So what we decided to do was create seperate ASP.NET Web Forms website and utilize the DNN providers (membership, roles, etc) to do the logging in. However we are currently having issues. The one in particular is ("unknown exception trying to write to log"). We've moved most of the DNN Global.asax (i.e. SimpleContainer instructions) file to the new website and added the necessary web.config sections and references however we get this error when a user logs in. We did copy over the same web.config machine key to the new website. The connection strings are also there (app settings and connection string sections and is named SiteSqlServer).
So my question is, has anyone created a new website around DNN without using DNN except for the membership? i.e. no modules, no skins, etc. Just validate user and get roles.
If you have what needs to be done to get DNN 5.2.x (or later) to log a user in and return the roles, could you post your steps?
The default DNN login is based on ASP.NET membership. If all you really want is the login feature, it will be MUCH MUCH easier to simply use the ASP.NET membership directly than try to rip it out of DNN.
What you are trying is not impossible, but certainly will require substantial patience with trial and error.
For only validation users and getting roles you could write your own simple providers that utilize dnn special tables in the databse like (Users, Roles, UserRoles, Profile etc). The table User is associated with the aspnet_Membership and aspnet_Users standard tables via the Username field.
There are many options which are open for you.
If you really don't want to digg into complecations of how to integrate the dnn membership and role provider will work, you can check dnn single sign on
Another option is to have your webforms application as a subfolder in your dnn website. that way you don't have to do much effort and you will have all the good things ready to get started. even you can directly convert your skin to master page and reuse almost all the css and image related suff
In addition to above, I also suggest another smart way to do this. Since you are considering a mobile site, why don't you try and detect the browser using Request.Browser and create a separate skin for dnn that is of smaller size. We can easily switch skins dynamically for service requests.
I hope this will help. If you have more questions regarding this, I will be happy to help. Just drop me and email and I will try to help you get as close as possible to get you going.
Good Luck
This is the route we took. We basically implemented DNN in the mobile version of the website. Except we only utilized the User Membership features of DNN. To do this we had to use all the same core DNN dll's and also include all the "bootup" features in the global.asax file. We also had to on every request inject a UserInfo object into the session context. I forget the key name for the UserInfo oject used but it is used by DNN and must be set in a DNN handler that we did not incorporate. Other than that it works perfectly. We have the ability to get all the roles a user is in and etc.
I will be adding new pages and adding functionality to current pages.
I would basically like to use new technology and but I don't know how should I add it to classic ASP pages
In other words, can I <#--include--> an aspx page in Classic asp page? Or anything of that sort, may be creating a user control in ASP.NET and using it in classic ASP?
You shouldn't really add it to the existing classic ASP pages. You may want to perform a full (yet slow) migration from classic ASP to .Net. Otherwise, you may just simply want to add your new functionality in new pages completely. If you have a templated site, this may become a litle cumbersome because you will need to recreate those templates in .Net since mixing .Net and classic in the same file is not possible.
You could ultimately end up resorting to iframes, but this makes browsers goofy sometimes. If your application is dependent on session, you'll need to account for that because .Net can't access a classic session unless you stick to primitives (string/int/etc) and use an outside state provider (like SQL) to hold the data with a sessionid that can be passed.
Having a hybrid site is a very tricky prospect and not one to be taken lightly. Tread carefully or you'll really put yourself in a pickle.
EDIT: Partial Hybrid example description
We had a 700 or so page site to transfer from classic asp to Asp.Net 2.0. Many of the pages were allotted time to be completely transferred during a single project, but a few areas were unable to be refactored and had to be accommodated. We put together a master page architecture for the new .Net structure, data library and business objects library, and we began the transfer. In incorporating the classic asp pages, we determined we had a few needs.
Since master pages would control basic layout, menu, header, footer, we would need to remove these elements from any pages brought over.
New session requirements were incompatible with existing session capabilities.
Classic asp pages must still be required to obey .Net formsauthentication.
I solved these problems with the following solutions:
Our application is targeted at a specific customer, so we were able to determine browser requirements. This allowed us to employ an iframe to hold classic asp content/applications without worrying that the iframe would go crazy on us in Webkit or Firefox or whatever.
To accommodate the session requirements, we built a small encryption/decryption engine in .Net and in classic asp that enabled us to encrypt a "query string" to pass the session information back and forth. It wasn't super secure, just enough that the casual user would not be tempted to mess with data. In addition we had to build two translation files. The first translation file was a .Net library static method that would take the session data, extract the necessary pieces and create the query string. The second one was the classic asp version that was designed to read the query string, parse the data and create the session primitives directly.
Making the classic asp pages behave for .Net was a server management issue. To do this, using the formsauthentication attribute protection="All" is supposed to be sufficient, but I found it still did not cover items that had other handlers anticipated. So I added a wildcard mapping in IIS to handle all files. From the properties of the IIS website, choose "Home Directory" and click "Configuration". At the bottom of the next window is a "Wildcard application maps" box. Click insert and navigate to the version of .Net you use to find the aspnet_isapi.dll file. This will force all files to parse against this file (which is harmless except that it kicks up the authentication request).
I can't provide specific code samples because of NDA, but this should at least provide some ideas on where to go from here.
You can have classic ASP pages running inside an ASP.NET application. You can add your pages in ASP.NET
Our customer has a requirement to extend the functionality of their existing large government project. It is an ASP.NET 3.5 (recently upgraded from 2.0) project.
The existing solution is quite a behemoth that is almost unmaintainable so they have decided that they want to provide the new functionality by hosting it on another website that is shown within the existing website.
As to how this is best to be done I'm not quite sure right now and if there is any security issues preventing it or that need to be considered.
Essentially the user would log on to the existing web site as normal and when cliicking on a certain link the page would load as normal with some kind of frame or control that has within it the contents of the page from the other site. IE. They do not want to simply redirect to the other site they want to show it embedded within the current one such that the existing menus etc are still available.
I believe if information needed to be passed to the embedded page it would be done using query strings as I'm not sure if there is even another way to accomplish this.
Can anyone give me some pointers on where to start at looking to implement this or any potential pitfalls I should be aware of.
Thanks
if the 2 sites are hosted from the same network (low latency between them) you could use state server for session management. that way, when you authenticate on one site, you will also be authenticated on the other, and share user state across them.
its pretty simple, in your web config of each web server you'd point to the state server (which could be located on one of the web servers)
<configuration>
<system.web>
<sessionState mode="StateServer"
stateConnectionString="192.168.1.103:42424"
/>
</system.web>
</configuration>
http://en.csharp-online.net/ASP.NET_State_Management%E2%80%94Storing_Session_State_out_of_Process
create a virtual directory under the primary domain. If your domain is www.mydomain.com then create a virtual directory www.mydomain.com/site and port the new website application under /site virtual directory. This was linking should become very much relavant. With this the virtual-directory application will also retain all domain cookies set by primary domain.
I would suggest to make the second website look exactly like the first one or at least use the same MasterPage, so you can redirect from one site to another without any visual difference.
If your site needs authentication, consider that you would need to do something to prevent the user to log in twice, an option could be to send an encrypted token to the second site.
All of this if you are forced to have a second site, if not just use a virtual directory
You could use something like UFrame. I've used it a couple of times and seems to do quite a good job with it...
"goodness of UpdatePanel and IFRAME combined"
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/uframe.aspx
I would use an iFrame to embed that website in within your existing application. Just set the "src" attribute and pass in any query string parameters the other site needs to render correctly.
You can still pass in sensitive data in the query string, however it would make sure to encrypt it before sending it in.
I know it is not the most elegant solution, but it gets the job done. And from the description of the existing app, it doesn't seem like your customer cares for "elegance" :)
Hope this helps
I am creating a standalone asp.net page that needs to be embedded into a sharepoint site using the Page Viewer Web Part. The asp.net page is published to the same server on a different port, giving me the URL to embed.
The requirement is that after a user is authenticated using Sharepoint authentication, they navigate to a page containing the asp.net web part for more options.
What I need to do from this asp.net page is query Sharepoint for the currently authenticated username, then display this on the page from the asp.net code.
This all works fine when I debug the application from VS, but when published and displayed though Sharepoint, I always get NULL as the user.
Any suggestions on the best way to get this to work would be much appreciated.
If you want to retrieve the currently authenticated user from the SharePoint context, you need to remain within the SharePoint context. This means hosting your custom web application within SharePoint (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc297200.aspx). Then from your custom application reference Microsoft.SharePoint and use the SPContext object to retrieve the user name. For example:
SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser.LoginName
You can still use the Page Viewer Web Part to reference the URL of the site, now located within the SharePoint context.
Thanks heaps for the answers!
Turns out that as long as the asp.net page is using the same URL and port as the Sharepoint site, authentication works across both sites.
The solution is to use a Virtual Directory inside of the sharepoint site and install the asp.net page there.
When it works in debug, is that being used in SharePoint?
Your page and the Sharepoint site might as well be on different servers as far as authentication is concerned -- in order to get the information over you might need to pass it via the QueryString from the webpart if you can -- or you might need to make your own webpart to do this (just put an IFRAME in the part with the src set to your page with the QueryString passing the username).
It does seem that this would be a security issue if you use the name for anything though -- if you are just displaying it, then it's probably fine.
If you actually need to be authenticated, you might need to add authentication into the web.config of the site hosting your standalone page.
edit: I think you'd have better luck putting your page on the same port and server as SharePoint.
I suspect you will have a hard time specifically querying SharePoint for the currently authenticated username. I can't think of a way to easily access the SharePoint context from a separate web application like you are describing.
I don't know what kind of authentication scheme you are using, but you may want to consider using Kerberos, as I've found that it can make these kinds of scenarios a little easier by allowing for delegation and passing credentials from application to application or server to server.