May 2009
This is part two of the OWS series of video tutorials presented by Paul Deschenes covering building module interfaces.
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
This is Part 2 of the series and covers:
Part 2 - Building Module Interfaces
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.
The videos contain:
Video 1 - Introduction, How to Create a Region, Template and Query
- A quick recap of part 1
- Knowledge Base Manager Module Administration
- Viewing the actions created by the QuickBuilder
- How to delete an action
- Actions, add a new Region
- How to create OnLoad and OnRender regions
- How to create a Template (for queries) in the OnRender region
- How to create a query in the Template
- Trick to make interface creation easier
- How to create a query action
- How to create a Column Clip
Time Length: 6min 51secs
Video 2 - How to Display the Query Results in a Table
- How to add form and query variables using Column Clip
- How to add a Header, Detail and Footer template to the OnRender Region
- How to create a No Results section if no results are found from the query
- How to create a table to display the query results using the Header, Footer and Detail templates
- How to use the Clip to display each of the fields in the table row
- How to view the results in the module
- How to format date / time results
Time Length: 9min 36secs
Video 3 - Debugging, Adding an Edit Link
- Debug for troubleshooting problems
- How to enable debugging
- How to check and view the debug log
- How to add an edit link to the Detail template
- How to reorganise the OnRender Region
- How to add If / Else-If statements for the edit link
Time Length: 8min 43secs
Video 4 - Secure SQL and the Detail Edit Template
- How to ensure secure SQL queries
- Region OnLoad with OWS variables
- Protect against SQL injection
- How to create a Detail Edit template
- The IIF tag
- SQLFIND
Time Length: 7min 54secs
Video 5 - Update, Add and Delete Records
- How to create an Update query
- How to create OWS form variables
- The Save Querystring
- How to Add new records
- How to Delete records
- Testing the module
- Time Length: 7min 58secs
Total Time Length: 41mins 2secs
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.
Throughout the next issues the following episodes will cover:
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.