July 2010
In this tutorial we demonstrate some advanced techniques for customizing the user experience in your DotNetNuke portal. We take advantage of security controls for managing how your users access and use your portals.
We show you a technique where we place an OWS module on all the pages in your portal or you can deploy this configuration as a skin object as we showed you in
the previous OWS tutorial.
The value of this configuration module technique is that you’re able to set variables for the whole user experience as they use your DotNetNuke portal.
We walk you through security techniques such as how to disable the back button, we show you javascript to automatically log users out of your portal after a period of time, plus we cover how to use the user info assignment in OWS to automatically authenticate certain types of users to your portal without a password.
We also demonstrate how to encrypt and decrypt query strings as a mechanism of securing the query strings that you pass to new pages and we show you how to configure a module that will redirect to a completely different portal in your DotNetNuke instance and automatically add that user as a registered user to the other portal.
We recommend you download the latest version of OWS from here:
www.openwebstudio.com
If you are new to OWS we recommend you first of all view the six part series on
How to Build a Knowledge Base Article Module.
The videos contain:
Video 1 - Creating and Preparing a New OWS Configuration, Compiling User Details for Registering to the Target Portal
- Introduction
- How to create and configure a new OWS configuration
- Configuring a new module to read from the new OWS configuration
- How to add the new module to every page in your portal
- Deleting components that are not needed for this configuration
- Adding assignments to set name, email, username, portal id, portal name and database id as session variables
- Setting variables to hold the users role id values for validating security
- How to determine if the current user is logged in and whether they are a superuser
- Setting the GetTabs session variable for quick referencing of tabs throughout the portal
Time Length: 7min 44secs
Video 2 - How to Automatically Register and Login a Current User Into Another Portal Through a HTML Link
- How to prevent the use of the back button
- How to timeout, logout and redirect to the login page
- Preventing a super user account from being logged out by this script
- Setting cookie variables to a logged out state
- How to redirect to the login page
- How to check the session variables were successfully executed
- Building the auto register link and encrypting important information
Time Length: 9min 28secs
Video 3 - Preparing the Target Portal to Accept the New User from the Source Portal
- Adding an authenticate OWS configuration to the target portal
- How to check if the current user is logged in to prevent the query running every time
- How to decrypt the values received from the source portal
- Checking the values received have been decrypted correctly
- Completing the authentication sequence and authorizing new users to the target portal
- How to pass actions to query string variables to aid security
- How to determine if the user is already a member of this portal
- Inserting user details into the target portal user table (registering and authorizing the user)
- How to add the new user to a specific user security role
- Checking if the user id and role id already exist in the user table
- How to determine the role ids for the portal
- How to determine the portal id for the portal
Time Length: 8min 15secs
Video 4 - Authenticating the New User and Testing the Results
- How to login and authenticate the new user without supplying a password
- Testing whether the authenticate action was successful
- How to redirect the logged in user to the current page
- Testing the link to the target portal
- Viewing the debug results to determine successful results
Time Length: 6min 3secs
Total Time Length: 31min 30secs
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