I'm trying to create a very basic web site creator in C#. I already created the templates but have no idea how to get them in the program so the user can pick one and customize it. Is there a certain library I should look into? I've bee told this can be easily created in php but I'd rather not go down that route.
If using .NET you can use WebControl controls to display a preview of your templates and make the user decide which one he wants.
Or a list of templates and single WebControl that parse and display the HTML of the current selected list item (template) and then make the user select.
To edit, just a bunch of controls (one for each template placeholder) that updates the view of the WebControl.
In the top link you found how to do it.
P.S. Templates can be stored on XML, Plain Text, DB or any other mean.
Either store the templates as files on the web-side and use them as templates, or store them in a DB. Unless your app is not web-based, in which case the same advice pretty much applies.
Related
I am working on a contract management system on c# form application, one of the main parts of the project is to create a letter.
In this part of the application a user can send a letter with in the shape he or she wants, so I need an editor like FCK in html, because my users should be able to insert table insert image and etc.
Any idea how to get this working? Any concerns?
You could indeed use a HTML WYSIWYG editor, but depending on the quality of it, it might raise problems when converting the output of it to print. This may also depend on the framework used to generate the Word document.
In one of our environments, we use CKEditor and JasperReports. That combination is suitable to export to Word, since JasperReports supports reading HTML and convert that to Word.
However, the best solution may depend on your business requirements and personal preferences.
If the application is a business application, another option is to let them edit the document in Word. Our company (disclaimer: I am biased) has build a product that supports editing a Word document from a template loaded and filled from a database (or multiple databases). However, if it is useful to you depends on your business requirements.
FCK is history now and as mentioned by others CKEditor is the successor. TinyMCE would be another alternative, or any other might be..
But what I want to mention is along with possible printing issues (that I have never dealt with) I want to underline another aspect:
my users should be able to insert table insert image and etc.
uploading and inserting images might be another issue...they don't come with a built in uploader, they sell it. you have the option to buy CKFinder along with CKEditor and Moxiemanager along with TinyMCE unless you choose to handle upload and insert into the editor process yourself.
I am making an application that will generate and SQL scripts from a template and after taking input for different fields from the user.
There are many templates, so the GUI needs to adjust for the fields that the user will be filling out.
In the interest of keeping this scalable, I'd rather not hardcode the GUIs into the program, but would like have it read from an XML file and change based on the template the user has selected.
This is preferred because if a new template were to arise, then all that the program needs is a XML file that corresponds to the template. And the actual code does not need to be changed.
I have my eyes set on using C# for this, as I have good experiences using it.
I am open to suggestions for other languages though.
Edit: This is a project for work, and I wanted to be sure that this is possible with C# before convincing my employers to expand into using C#.
You could do this sort of thing by subclassing Windows.Forms.Form and adding a constructor to accept your XML file as a parameter. Add a parser for your XML file that will interpret instructions for which labels and fields you want to add to a consistent form design (say, two columns with a label for field name on the left and the actual input field on the right, easily achievable by filling the form with a TableLayoutPanel). You just need to lay out your design constraints from the beginning and stick to them.
This is essentially what visual studio does when you create a form through the designer anyway, so I'd suggest you start by creating an example form manually and just looking at the kind of code it places in the form's designer.cs file
Any language can do that. It's more about design patterns than specific technologies.
If you meant writing a GUI only declaratively and with XML, though, then no. You'd have to write your own parsing and GUI assembling code.
I've a question related to dynamic code generation (html) with C# based on a template. The user sets all options (e.g. whether or not a <div> should be displayed, whether or not an image in the template should change by a specific date,...) and provides the content (text, images) needed for code generation. The generated code is needed for a WIFI hotspot site.
The template consists of HTML, CSS and JavaScript which gets extended and modified by the user-defined settings at runtime. I also think of providing "meta settings" in the template to define, whether or not some options CAN be disabled set or not.
My major problem:
How to define the template to dynamically extend the template code easily? For example, if a user option is enabled at runtime, I'm in need to add JavaScript code on top and HTML code below another (specific) place. Another example is to hide content (a defined ) when another option is disabled...
I'm not sure what's the best practice to handle that requirement. Maybe HTML elements with id attribute can help eliminate some of the problems. But with JavaScript I'm not sure. Maybe the template needs to be a XML which creates the final HTML at runtime? Any idea?
Has anyone an idea how to handle that?
UPDATE/INFO:
The project is written in pure C# - without any ASP.NET. It is a desktop project working with HTML files and GENERATING HTML files (as an output).
I suppose you can use ASP.NET MVC Razor view engine to render an html to a file with the help of this question. With Razor you will get the support of dynamic view (aka template) changes, rich template syntax etc. Everything you can do when create a web site. Just render the html to a file not a response body.
I'm trying to switch my custom cms written in php into .net c#. I was thinking to use cms as a learning project. I'm going to use C#, NHibernate ORM layer, mssql, mvc3 and jquery.
I'm aware there are plenty of commercials or open source cms, but still I'm going to spend some of my free time trying to learn new technology working on project like this.
So, is there anyone out there who is willing to share some ideas on creating cms domain model, usefull link, ideas, etc.
Thanks
A really basic CMS consist of 3 elements:
one database table to hold your "pages". The table structure is "name" and "content"
a route to transform requests of type /cms/pagename to a fixed controller, the method called cms and pagename as a parameter
a embeddable html editor
Now, there are two ways your "page" can be invoked. It is either create mode or view/edit mode.
In "create" mode, the page is requested but it is not in the database yet (e.g. cms/announcement1). In this mode you create a view consisting of a html editor and upon submit, you persist the page to the database.
In "view" mode, the page is requested and is IS in the database. You perform any necessary rewriting (for example you rewrite internal links of the form [cms/pagename] to a fully routable http address) and render the content.
If the user is authorized to edit the page, you also show a "edit" button which then invokes the html editor with the page loaded and ready to be edited.
And that's it.
There are tons of additional elements (caching, different built-in page types, embedding images, youtubes, preformatted texts) etc. but all of them are optional and you can introduce new features when you have the core already implemented.
Once I wrote a simple CMS following the structure above, it was a part of a bigger solution and till now it's been sucesfully deployed several hundred times. An advantage of a custom CMS is that it can be really simple and easily maintanable.
in sharepoint 2007 i would like to know what is the best approach to build a webpart that has its style,but not controls, altered by a XSLT... what i want to do is to build a "skeleton" (lets say its composed by text box and a button) and implement what the button must do... but the web-designer can provide me a XSL and the webpart must apply the xsl, altering the design and style, but not the programming... any ideas?
XSLT is better approach to provide dynamic design and when its required to provide the end user the facility to change the style of display anytime in future. Its good to implement with web parts where you are required to have multiple views like List view or search results. If you require a data entry form to be created i don't think xslt based web parts should be choice. unless until you are using Client object model(Java script API's)