By Jon Henning on
5/12/2008
One of the new features coming in Cambrian is an update in the permissions grid. The current grid supports two states, Allow and Null (not assigned). The new grid will support three states (Allow, Deny, and Null). The obvious question here is how do you present this to the user? The current design allows for a nice compact way to set the permissions within a grid utilizing checkboxes. The new way will use a new DotNetNuke WebControl that supports multiple states and mimics a checkbox. The original name I came up with for the control was DNNTriStateCheckbox. However, while developing this control I soon realized there was no reason I needed to only support 3 states and saw the opportunity to support any number of states and not necessarily look like a checkbox. So the control is now called DNNMultiStateBox. It is probably the simplest of all the controls in the Read More »
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By Jon Henning on
11/14/2007
For a long time now many skinners for DotNetNuke have felt like customizing individual menu items was like looking for the Holy Grail. All the menus I have contributed to the community (Solpart and DNNMenu) have always had the ability to customize each menu item. The problem always was
how do we allow DotNetNuke the ability to customize the items? The only place...
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By Jon Henning on
10/18/2007
The conversion of the ClientAPI and WebControls to utilize the MS AJAX Framework along with emitting xhtml compliant markup is near completion. It is now time to start testing the backwards compatibility of the conversion. In order to adequately do this, I am asking for the communities help. If you are a skinner who uses any of the DotNetNuke webcontrols (DNNMenu, DNNTreeView, etc.) your assistance is needed. If you are a module developer who uses any portion of the ClientAPI or any of the WebControls,...
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By Jon Henning on
8/20/2007
Sometimes I grow frustrated when trying to solve apparently simple things, that end up taking most of the day to come up with an answer. And if the answer is one that is bordering on a hack, I am even more distraught. This happened to me again while trying to optimize the latest version of the webcontrols, that will now use the Microsoft AJAX extensions framework. The optimization deals with allowing the control to persist its current structure. For example, when you have a tree that supports populate on demand,...
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By Jon Henning on
3/2/2007
DotNetNuke has supported navigation providers for about a year and a half. Currently there are 4 providers we support. The provider model is based off of interfaces, promoting a one-size-fits-all mentality. This can be both a blessing and a curse. The curse as it relates to the navigation providers is that it limits the features that the navigation provider's control can support. For example, recently I added support for the DNNMenu to support horizontal submenus. In order for this feature to be used in...
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By Jon Henning on
3/2/2007
Thought I'd mention that the Edit In Place enhancements will be incorperated into 4.5.
Instead of rewriting an entire entry, I think it is best to simply point you to the original blog, which also links the document with all the design details.
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By Jon Henning on
2/13/2007
Yesturday I blogged on the MS AJAX framework's PageMethod implementation falling short when it comes to control developers. Before I completely gave up on this, I decided to investigate some of the toolkit's controls to see how they handle these callbacks. Two controls came up in my search: Rating and ReorderList. I spent some time investigating the Rating control, which seems to utilize the classic ASP.NET...
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By Jon Henning on
2/12/2007
With my plate relatively clear, I have decided to spend some time investigating the released version of Microsoft AJAX Extensions for ASP.NET 2.0 (formarly Atlas and from now on I will call it MS AJAX). Specifically, I want to see what advantages and disadvantages I would have by utilizing this framework instead of (or addition to) the ClientAPI. One of the first things that I looked for was the ability to make "callbacks". I had heard about Atlas' ability to invoke webservices for some time now and have been on a project that was IE specific and therefore was able to use the WebService behavior to accomplish the same thing. While this functionality is cool, people who know me, know that my real passion is for writing reusable webcontrols. Writing a webcontrol that needs to communicate with the server
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By Jon Henning on
2/8/2007
I am pleased to announce the release of the latest DotNetNuke WebControls v1.5. I must admit, this release took a lot longer than I had anticipated. I have spent the last couple weeks putting everything else on hold in order to finish up the DNNTabStrip control. Most of the work done will be visible to the public, however, there is quite a bit of work that I spent in prototyping that may never see the light of day.
The bulk of the work was done in the DNNTabStrip control. This required some additional...
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By Jon Henning on
2/4/2007
The DNNTabStrip control has been under development for quite some time. The original document was written in August of 2006. I am happy to announce that I was able to finish the final chapter for it just a couple hours before the Super Bowl (Go Bears!). Chapter 6 deals with the two callback methods available, detailing under what situations you would choose one over the other. Here is the introduction.
The ClientAPI currently supports two different types of Callbacks: Simple and ProcessPage. ...
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