Module Development

In this tutorial we add some cool features to our OWS Knowledge Base Article module, this covers social networking and working with APIs and web services.

Including: Send This to a Friend email, AddThis social bookmarks, Facebook Share API, integrating Yahoo! answers API. These are powerful techniques to enhance your OWS Modules.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - How to Build an 'Email to a Friend' function
• Video 2 - How to Add Social BookMarks with AddThis and Share on Facebook
• Video 3 - How to Display and Search Yahoo Answers via their API

Total Time Length: 34min 21secs

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. This covers how to debug form variables, session variables, SQL queries, and troubleshooingt problems.

Next we enhance the reporting page that we built in episode 4 provide a facility to export your report to Microsoft Excel CSV files and HTML formatted Word documents.

Following this we enhance the Knowledgebase Manager 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.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - Introduction, Debugging, Form Variable Troubleshooting
• Video 2 - Debugging Session Variables and SQL Queries
• Video 4 - How to Upload New Knowledge Base Articles Using a CSV File
• Video 5 - How to Use the DotNetNuke Scheduler with OWS

This tutorial demonstrates how to add personalization to the knowledge base module.

We demonstrate InterModule Communications and create a ‘My Saved Articles’ module. This module allows the user to create their own list of favourite knowledgebase articles.

We demonstrate working with JQuery to create a ToolTip, how to change the “fetching data” message that is displayed for Ajax module refreshes (ie. When searching for an article and the site is loading the data) to an animated GIF and we show how to enable the OWS Text Editor, which allows us to create Rich Text/HTML articles.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - Introduction, Building the Saved Articles Module
• Video 2 - Add to My Saved Function, Delete Function, JQuery Tooltip
• Video 3 - Fetching Data Customization, Using the Text / HTML Editor
• Video 4 - Multi Category Selection for a Knowledgebase Article - OWS Checkboxes (Advanced Technique)
• Video 5 - Interactive Logging Techniques, Beginning Reporting - OWS Columns and Column Templates

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 show you how to enable and configure Full Text Search on the server, tricks on how to output the articles that people are viewing so they are printable and how to add an articles rating feature and the principles for a query based look up drop down field so that you can query tables from the database to make record selections.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - Introduction, Categories Module
• Video 2 - Categories Module and Passing IDs to the Search Module
• Video 3 - Search Knowledge Base Module, Full-Text SQL Search
• Video 4 - Search Results Formatting, Article Ratings
• Video 5 - Print Functions

This tutorial demonstrates how to download and import source code into R2i's Open Web Studio module.

To accompany our series on Open Web Studio we are providing you with the source code for the knowledgebase application. This tutorial shows you how to take the code we provide and import it into the OWS module on your own DotNetNuke site.

The video contains:

• How to download and open the module source code
• How to import the configuration source code into OWS
• Preserve configuration ID option
• How to publish the configuration code

This tutorial demonstrates the actual coding process when building modules with Open Web Studio.

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.

This is Part 2 of the series and covers:

• Video 1 - Introduction, How to Create a Region, Template and Query
• Video 2 - How to Display the Query Results in a Table
• Video 3 - Debugging, Adding an Edit Link
• Video 4 - Secure SQL and the Detail Edit Template
• Video 5 - Update, Add and Delete Records

This tutorial demonstrates 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.

The series will take the viewer through six episodes, where at the end the viewer will have a fully functional Technical Knowledge Base application.

This is Part 1 of the series and covers:

• Video 1 - Introduction and Initial Configuration
• Video 2 - Actions and Tools
• Video 3 - How to Create Actions with Master / Detail / Edit Configuration

Total Time Length: 27min 25secs

This article explains how to make changes to DotNetNuke modules varying their look-and-feel, as well as adding some fundamental behaviour. Explanation is done by example of the Blog module.

How to improve a DotNetNuke module (The Blog module)