August 2009
This is part five of the OWS series of video tutorials presented by Paul Deschenes covering Debugging, Enhanced Reporting, Importing Records and Scheduling in OWS.
This tutorial demonstrates Debugging, Enhanced Reporting, Importing Records and Scheduling in Open Web Studio.
We begin the tutorial by demonstrating how to debug your OWS application using the built in OWS tools. We show you how to debug form variables, session variables, SQL queries, and troubleshoot problems where your application is not functioning properly.
Next we enhance the reporting page that we built in episode 4 and we provide a facility to export your report to Microsoft Excel CSV files and HTML formatted Word documents.
Following this we enhance the Knowledgebase Manager page so that it can import records from a CSV file, this allows you to automatically import multiple knowledgebase articles simultaneously.
To finish, we demonstrate how to schedule your OWS configuration using the DotNetNuke Scheduler, this is a really powerful and flexible feature. We demonstrate how to setup a query which executes each day and checks for any articles that have a pending status. If there any are pending articles, an email is sent to the administrator of the website.
Before you view these tutorials it is recommended that you visit
www.openwebstudio.com and download the latest version of OWS as there have been a few recent enhancements.
The Series
These tutorials aim to introduce the beginner to Open Web Studio and demonstrate how to create a functional web application with little or no coding experience required.
This series will take the viewer through six episodes, where at the end the viewer will have a fully functional Technical Knowledge Base application.
Open Web Studio is a free robust tool for building data bound forms, modules, utilities and more.
Major Framework Features of Open Web Studio:
- Zero Footprint
- Browser based IDE environment
- Rapid change maintenance
- Universal Data Binding
- Rich Debugging
- Supports AJAX, JSON, REST
- Create distributable OWS applications for DNN, Sharepoint, .Net applications
You can download OWS from
www.openwebstudio.com
The videos contain:
Video 1 - Introduction, Debugging, Form Variable Troubleshooting
- Introduction
- How to debug your OWS application
- Form Variable troubleshooting
- Demonstration of a problem with updating categories
- How to enable debugging
- How to view the history of the debug log
- How to view the Event Detail of the debug log
- How to view the event detail from clicking on the Update link
- How to view the form variables event details debug log
- How to edit the form variable error
Time Length: 10min 00secs
Video 2 - Debugging Session Variables and SQL Queries
- How to view the Update JavaScript link
- How to change the OWS Fetch string
- How to troubleshoot a Session Variable
- How to view the update JavaScript link for the category filter
- How to troubleshoot SQL queries
- How to debug and view the SQL queries
- Time Length: 7min 08secs
- Video 3 – How to Export CSV and Word Document Reports
- How to export your reports into CSV files or formatted Word documents
- How to create an ACTION tag
- Message Action for 'DoExport'
- How to create a SQL Query File action to export to a CSV file
- Demonstration of exporting and saving a CSV report file
- How to format a HTML table based Word document report file
- How to create the column and table structure for the Word file
- How to create a Runtime Value Action to export a Word file
- Demonstration of exporting and saving a Word doc report file
Time Length: 8min 31secs
Video 4 - How to Upload New Knowledge Base Articles Using a CSV File
- How to create an upload CSV file link to upload new articles
- How to add the 'File Browse' input button
- An example CSV file with 5 knowledge base articles
- How to configure the File Action to accept the csv file
- How to map the columns from the csv file
- Demonstration of importing the CSV files and uploading the new articles
Time Length: 6min 48secs
Video 5 - How to Use the DotNetNuke Scheduler with OWS
- How to notify via email on a scheduled basis if any Knowledge base articles are in a pending status
- How to setup the DotNetNuke schedule
- How to setup the OWS actions
- Query action to find articles that have a pending status
- Email action to send the articles that have a pending status
Time Length: 5min 58secs
Total Time Length: 38min 25secs
So far in the 'How to Build a Public Knowledge Base Module with OWS' series we have covered:
How to install Open Web Studio, a review of the Open Web Studio key components and support features, and how to build your first components with Quick Builder.
This episode walks you through downloading and installing OWS, adding and configuring the module on a page, opening and reviewing the key components of the OWS Administration development environment and building your first Master-Detail-Edit form using the OWS Quickbuilder utility. At the conclusion, you will have built the creating and editing components for adding articles to your knowledge base application.
Deep dive explanation of what Quick Builder did in episode one and then recreating the master-detail-edit article pages manually.
This episode explores the actual coding process. While Quickbuilder is a great "getting started" tool, it does not provide the understanding necessary to build and customize modules to specific requirements. In this tutorial we dissect and manually build the module to get a full understanding of building a query, using AJAX calls and other OWS actions, and formatting the results so that you can build your own modules of any type with any requirement.
This tutorial demonstrates how to build the user search page for searching knowledge base articles. We demonstrate how to implement record paging and column sorting, how to create a categories module and how to edit the knowledge base manager page so that we can record categories for each of our articles.
We then explore SQL Server, and show you how to enable and configure Full Text Search on the server. This is so that within the modules we can implement the Full Text Search syntax to provide the users greater functionality in their searches.
Following this we show you the principles for a query based look up drop down field so that you can query tables from the database to make record selections, and to finish the tutorial, how to output the articles that people are viewing so they are printable.
This tutorial demonstrates how to add personalization to the knowledge base module. We demonstrate InterModule Communications and create a ‘My Saved Articles’ module. We work with JQuery to create a ToolTip, we change the “fetching data” message that is displayed for Ajax module refreshes, and we demonstrate how to enable the OWS Text Editor, which allows us to create Rich Text/HTML articles.
At this point we explore an advanced OWS technique where we change the assignment of a single category selection for an article and we create multi-category selection for each knowledgebase article.
To finish the tutorial we cover interactive logging techniques, and beginning reporting with OWS columns and column templates.
Throughout the next issues the following episodes will cover:
This tutorial demonstrates how to place a "Send This to a Friend" email link on each Knowledge Base article. Following this we show you how to integrate AddThis into the Knowledge Base module, AddThis is a bookmarking tool.
Next we demonstrate how to share an article on Facebook using the Facebook Share API and to finish, we demonstrate how to display and search Yahoo! answers via their API. This helps to provide the user with additional information related to the Knowledge Base article.
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