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)
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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 want to list a group of similar templates(which contains photos,texts and hyperlinks in a certain layout) on my web page.
So I'd like to know some technologies which can provide me the ability to develop my own template so that I can feed this template with paths of photos, text and hyperlinks and the template will arrange the layout.
I am thinking of using Customer Control + Repeater to do this job.
But I think there could be some other really brilliant technologies which can do the same thing in a easier way.
I'd love to see the name of technologies and code to demonstrate how to use it.
With ASP.NET, repeater is fair choice, you can easily build your any kind of template. And you can use server side tags too.
If you are willing to bind your data at client side, there are lot of client side technologies available to bind Json data, such as Jquery template, Knockout.js etc. (you can also explore other client side data binding technologies such as backbone.js, ember.js, batman.js)
Here is the list of technologies and examples.
another good read about Javascript framework:
http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2012/08/01/rich-javascript-applications-the-seven-frameworks-throne-of-js-2012/
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.
I am creating a new support center and "self-help" customer service module for an application. The CIO really likes the flow of eBay's "Contact Us" pages, that basically work like this:
First, you select a specific topic from a group of topics (e.g. Buying, Selling, Account on eBay)
You're then presented with what appears to be one of three variable types of information, based on the topic you picked (names are just what I'm calling them in some preliminary sketches):
"Descriptive": displays rich text with possible links to other parts of the application.
"Choice": Displays a list of additional topics
"Action": Lets the user look up an item and do some action (e.g. cancel)
From some experimentation, a choice can list to other choices, or to a descriptive block of text, or to an action section.
I'm turning up blanks as to the proper architecture for this. My platform of choice is ASP.NET (WebForms, sadly; we have no desire to touch MVC here) so the "Action" areas would have to be a user control that's dynamically loaded into a placeholder, but I'm more concerned with a possible database structure for this. I would need a way to know if each topic leads to one of the three types above and then on the page dynamically load either the content, list of links, or user control which makes things a bit trickier, nevermind the fact that a non-technical user will have to update and add the information from some kind of administrative panel.
Any suggestions for doing something like this? I'm not on a tight deadline, but I can't take too long or I'll be considered to be wasting time and not producing results.
If you can store the "tree of knowledge" in some way, like a custom XML file which would organize all options / possible actions, descriptions etc. Then you can "walk" it based on user's selections and display appropriate user control with content generated on the fly based on the contents of the XML node you're currently at.
Your "admin tool" would then need to update/modify the XML file, and your "public" CMS would render user controls inside an ASPX form.
One of the projects I worked on used this methodology for intranet's user menu - effectively a knowledge base of hyperlinks / actions split in to categories so they can be drilled-down to. Each element can contain links to other elements - so you have a spider-web like navigatable chain / workflow.
Just make sure each element has a unique ID (trivial to implement) and you can always get at it through xpath.
By having users modify a "working copy" and keeping backups of the live XML file when changes are published you also get versioning / roll-back which would be difficult to do in a DB.
If I personally was doing this I would just roll some MVC3 controllers that handle the work flow steps as needed. That seems to be out for you however.
With webforms, I would most likely consider handling this using Windows Workflow Foundation (the learning curve is moderately steep on this). Here's a pretty good example on using WF Flexible Web UI Workflow application through ASP.NET MVC & Windows Workflow Foundation. It's built on MVC however you could easily replace the return Views() with return UserControls.
Following a model like this would defacto give you the MVC pattern. The controller dictating flow matches very well for a workflow scenario.
Edit: Since this even seems out of the question, at this point you're best option is just writing a controller class that will manage the flow manually (probably a bunch of state / if checks) and then redirect users or return the appropriate user control.
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.