June 2009
This is part three of the OWS series of video tutorials presented by Paul Deschenes covering the User Search Interface in OWS.
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 3 of the series and covers:
Part 3 - The User Search Interface
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.
The videos contain:
Video 1 - Introduction, Categories Module
- Introduction
- How to add a new page for the User Interface of the Knowledgebase
- How to add a new Categories OWS module
- How to add a new Search Interface OWS module
- How to link the OWS modules to OWS configurations
- The Categories module
- How to create the KB Category table
- How to add a category
- The actions and variables for the Categories module
- On Render Region
- If EditCat query string
- Detail Template
- Alternating rows
- CSS class codes
Time Length: 9min 44secs
Video 2 - Categories Module and Passing IDs to the Search Module
- Query Template first column
- ows.Fetch
- Knowledge Base Module Administration
- Assignment action Control.Header
- IIF tag
- How to make the edit section of the module only available to administrators
- How to execute SQL to add the category field to the table
- How to add a dropdown field, create the variable and then update the SQL to insert the category value when updating or adding new articles
- How to add a new variable frmCategory
- How to add a dropdown field to the table HTML
- How to create a subquery to populate the DropDown List
- How to create the update and insert queries
- How to view the articles, edit an article and select a category
Time Length: 12min 06secs
Video 3 - Search Knowledge Base Module, Full-Text SQL Search
- Search Knowledge Base Module administration
- How to build the Ratings table
- Region – OnLoad
- Control.Header, SetCat, DoReset
- Region – Query Variables
- Region – OnRender
- The search queries
- How to setup the Free Text search
- How to setup Free Text Search on the SQL Server database and table
- Database properties
- How to create a Full-text Catalog
- How to configure the Catalog
- How to schedule a daily Full Text search
- Search HTML
Time Length: 10min 17secs
Video 4 - Search Results Formatting, Article Ratings
- Row headers of the search results
- Sort tags for a column
- Detail template and CSS classes
- ows.Fetch for read more...
- No Results template
- Demonstration of the search interface and categories interaction
- How to enable Paging for the search records
- How to set the module to use standard query language if not using free text search
- How to display an article and view the ‘Rate This solution’ feature
- Working with print article in OWS
Time Length: 8min 33secs
Video 5 - Print Functions
- How to create a print function for each article
- How to create a new page for Print
- How to create a skin for print
- How to create a new print module
- How to create a new Region – Render
- Query template, detail template, variable
- How to add an OWS print module to the print page
- How to add a print icon to the detail template
- How to disable the DotNetNuke default print icon
Time Length: 10min 23secs
Total Time Length: 51min 3secs
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.
Throughout the next issues the following episodes will cover:
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.