I am working on a website using DNN as my Content Management System of choice, and I'm running into an issue where the main content area and the side area will switch based on which page you are on.
In the .ascx file I know I can write a conditional based on the URL you're on:
<% If Request.RawUrl.Contains("piece-of-url") Then %>
but I was wondering if there is a more permanent or reliable way to mark a page, just in case the page name changes, or if there are pages underneath that page that may not have the same styling (although, I can include the extension as a way to get around this).
Thanks for your help.
In DNN if you want to change the way the page functions, base on the page you are on, you would typically either define a separate SKIN as Brent Mannering suggests, or apply a differnt module to different pages on the site.
That being said, you can also target the "TabId" of DNN pages, in the code for the ASCX file for the Skin you could define functionality based on the tabid.
When I've needed to do this, I've created a 'Bookmark' module and added it on the page.The bookmark module just stores a value pair in the settings, in my instance I was using values like <"HotelHomePage", "Hilton"> or <"DestinationHomePage", "Sydney">. This way, page name doesn't matter, you can change the page name, move the page to a different parent, but as long as the bookmark value on the page stays the same, you will always have it.
Just make sure that a bookmark exists for each page you need it on.
Related
I have written a longer text on this subject posted earlier today. Perhaps the text was too long, so I rephrase it very briefly here:
I want to design a very standard site where the user gets the opportunity to navigate to different aspx pages with the aid of navigation menus (left, top). I do not want the entire page to be reloaded when changing the content page for three reasons: state handling, flickering and bandwidth conservation. I just want to load a new aspx page into a "main content area" with the rest of the site untouched.
What is the best way to achieve this? I must not rely on master pages or not master pages or AJAX or not AJAX. It must not rely on anything specific. I just wonder what the standard method would be to achieve this. It must be a pretty common wish.
Thanks
/DT
You can use iframe for this.
The <iframe> tag specifies an inline frame.
An inline frame is used to embed another document within the current HTML document.
<iframe src="http://www.w3schools.com"></iframe>
I've just started learning ASP.Net but I've come across something that I don't know how it works. Say I have a "main page" that looks the same but depending on what GET value "page" says I should try loading a certain page without changing the main content. I have an index.aspx and whenever I goto index.aspx?page=login, it should try to load login.aspx.
Sure it works, but it writes out the ASP.Net code and not processing it. Not like PHP's include().
What I've tried is: Response.WriteFile() without no luck...
This is because, I have an index.aspx with an runat server id of Content and whatever the page I'm suppose to load is going to go there. So I don't have to recreate every page I make.
Any suggestions?
I think you should look at Master Pages. ASP.NET master pages allow you to create a consistent layout for the pages in your application.
A single master page defines the look and feel and standard behavior that you want for all of the pages (or a group of pages) in your application.
You can then create individual content pages that contain the content you want to display. When users request the content pages, they merge with the master page to produce output that combines the layout of the master page with the content from the content page.
ASP.NET Master Pages - MSDN
Before making a CSS change that might possibly have unintended consequences, what's a good way to find where else on the whole site (not just this page) that id or class is used? (It doesn't have to be exhaustive, and semi-manual processes are ok, too.)
For a bit of context, it's a Joomla-based site with a lot of content, and I'm not yet familiar with most of it. The id in question has a two letter name, and I have no idea where else it might be used. I don't have direct access to the server for any grep-like approaches.
The only technique I can think of is using Stylish to make an obvious change to that one selector, and browsing the site for a bit to see where it pops up.
The easiest way would be a local grep, but since you don't have access to the server, try downloading it locally using wget:
wget -r -l --domains=http://yourdomain.com http://yourdomain.com
That'll recursively retrieve pages from your domain to an infinite depth, but only following links to pages within your domain.
Once it's on disk, do a local grep and you're golden.
I use unused-css.com for this sort of thing. You simply put in your webpage, and it will look through the whole site (incl. login) and give you the CSS that you actually are using.
I've found it to be 95% correct - but it only doesn't pick up on things like some CSS browser hacks and some errors (ie. the CSS only displays after an error), so it should work fine for this.
You could also check the original template (assuming the template is a commercial one) to see where the id perhaps should be (they usually lay everything out in their demo template), but unused-css won't tell you exactly where it is used, only if it is or not. For that, I'd start with a view-source -> find on the major pages, and then try other mentioned solutions.
Get the whole site's source tree into an IDE like NetBeans or Eclipse and then do a recursive search for id="theid" on the root folder.
If this is not possible, how are you updating the CSS?
Assuming you don't want to do the grep approach:
Is the ID in question appearing in the actual content area of the page, or in the 'surrounding' areas? If it seems like it's not part of the content, but rather appears in a template, you could search the template files for it. As you're updating the CSS, I'm going to assume you can at least get a hold of the template files. Many text editors/IDE's will let you do a 'global search'. I'd load the template files in TextMate (my texteditor of choice) and do a "search in project" for the particular ID.
That will at least give you a semblance of an idea of where in the site that ID shows up. No, it won't be every 'page', but you'll know what kind of page it appears on (which, with a CMS, is really what you're after).
If the ID in question appears in the content, that is, it was hand-entered by content creators, you'll have to go another route. Do you have access to the database? If you can get a dump of the database (I think Joomla! is MySQL based), you can open the sql in something like Sequel Pro and do a search in the content records for that ID.
This is not actually as hard as it sounds. First place to look the index.php file for the template. This file should be pretty small without a ton of code unless the template is from a developer that uses a template framework. If the ID is in there, then it will show up on every page in the website since this is the foundation that every page is built on.
If you don't find it in there, then you need to determine whether it is displaying in a module position or in the component area. You should be able to tell the difference by looking at the index.php file from the template.
If it's in a module position, then the ID should only show up in instances of that particular module.
If it's in the component area, then it should only display in any pages being created by the component. That does leave the possibility of it affecting many elements you don't want changed. But there is a solution for that. you can use the page class suffix in a menu item to add a unique id/class to the page you want to change (depends on your template). With that unique suffix you can create a specific selector that will only affect the pages you want to change.
I'm trying to display content from anther site on to mine using an iframe. I'm just wondering if its possible to only display certain parts (divs) of this external page in the iframe.
Thanks!
You could try and use some jQuery on your site to dynamically alter the styles of the external site. I did something similar with SSRS where we had an iframe containing SSRS reports which we wanted to style. We used jQuery in the master page to find the matching elements inside the frame target and alter them as required.
As long as the external site is well marked up (plenty of ids, good semantic structure) you may be able to hide/re-arrange elements as you require. You may also need to delay the jQuery execution as the frame contents may not be completely loaded by the time your JavaScript executes.
You can find a VERY simple example here.
BUT, be careful of the legalities involved with showing partial content from someone else's site. If you're presenting their site as your own or without identifying information, you could be infringing on their copyright.
I am converting an old html based website to ASP.NET, so that we can include more features like AJAX, Databases later on to the site. Currently my task is to create a new .aspx page for each older html page. To keep the layout persistent i have made a master page.
So currently i am building a content page from the master page, then renaming the content page and adding the text from the html page to the content placeholder area. However i was wondering if can cannot write a system, which can act as a Page Thrower.
Each hyperlink when clicked goes to a serverside code, where it requests the page it wants to load. Typically a webserver expects that the pagelink specified in the hyperlink does exist physically, but here what i am trying to do is that. Say the link is for the page "TravelDetails", the page need not exist physically, but the content of it is present in a file in (html format). so the Page Thrower gathers the data to display for that page, it has a master page already, it adds the html of it there and then throws the custom page. This way i don't have to keep 100+ aspx pages, i can do with a single page and maintain another data structure to store the content (static data) for each page. any guidance if my approach is right, and how to go about it?
Thanks
I think you should try some cms avaialable in market like dotnetnuke. Because every time you need to have to create a web page for a html page. In future if there will be any changes then it will take time. While in cms like dotnetnuke you just need to paste your html in existing system. You don't need to do coding again.
DotNetNuke is a free one. There are other Content Management System also available as well. Another advantage is that dotnetnuke is having skin features. So if you change skin at one place. You need not to do it for all the places.
Take a look at ASP.NET MVC. It uses ASP.NET Routing, which may help you.
Alternatively you can use ASP.NET Routing without MVC, too.
Matthias
Just a thought.
Create a page linked to the Master Page. In the content place holder add a Panel.
Let your Page thrower decide which page to display, retrieve the html data & add it to the panel at runtime.
Why don't you create the pages dynamically and then use asp.net caching in order to increase throughput.