Personal Website Starter Kit - Adding A Links Table

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Personal Website Starter Kit : Adding a Links Table

Subjects > Computers > Microsoft > Visual Studio 2005 Beta > Personal Website Starter Kit

Personal Web Site Start Kit - How To Create A Fully Functional Links Manager

Microsoft now supplies several different starter kits to help with learning the .NET environment. These are completed projects without a lot of complexity that can serve as the basis for other projects. One of these is the "Personal Website Starter Kit", which is the basis for a personal site including an about page, a resume page, a favorite links page, and and multiple public and private photo albums. It shows how to use the new Login authentication functionality in .Net 2.0 to easily provide for user registration, login, and user roles.

One of the problems is what to do with these starter kits? Besides making simple edits to the projects, and looking under the hood, what of more substantial complexity can be done to enhance these starter kits? This series of articles details one idea: The links page that comes with this project is just a static page of links grouped into categories. This tutorial shows how to turn that into a complete table driven web based links management system that allows the public to submit links, and the site owner to easily create and manage categories and links.

This tutorial will show how to implement such a feature, beginning with the static links page included in the Personal Website Starter Kit. It focuses not only on adding the new functionality, but also on the process of development. While many tutorials take you from the starting point to the finishing point by the most direct route possible, this tutorial take a slightly longer path. This tutorial focuses on typical problems and sidetracks that might happen during a more usual learning and development process that didn't have the exact endpoint outlined in advance. This will give a more realistic experience in using the development tools, as well as the development process.

With this tutorial, the end result will be implemented incrementally, and some problems will be encountered along the way. Some of the problems will be coding errors, some will be logic errors, and some will be design errors. When an error message is encountered during development, it is often not known exactly what kind of error it is, so this tutorial will show a step by step process of discovering what these errors mean. Then the tutorial will offer discussion of solutions, and during the process of implementing the solutions the reader will discover how error messages change during the process.

Sometimes the fixes are very simple. But, as in real life development, sometimes this tutorial will need to re-impliment previously completed routines to deal with roadblocks encountered in later development. By repeated exposure to typical errors encountered in the development process and their solutions, the reader of this tutorial will be better understand the development process and be better prepared to deal with these and similar errors in their own projects.

Part 0 - Setting Up The Personal Website Starter Kit

• Loading the tutorial template
• Using Visual Source Safe

Part 1 - User View Of The Links

• Adding Links And Categories Tables To The Database
• Create The Business Object For Links And Categories
• Adding an Object Data Source To Our Web Page
• Displaying The Links For A Given Category
• Formatting The Item Template For The Links
• Fixing A Display Problem With Long Titles
• Showing The Title And Description Of The Selected Category

• Summary: Cut and paste of all the code to implement Part 1 features

Part 2 - Submitting New Links

• Where Should We Add Major New Functionality?
• Adding The Submit Links Page
• Routines To Add A New Link
• Linking Back To The List Of All Links For A Category
• Hiding Fields That We Don't Want Users To Edit

Part 3 - Adding The Administrator's Links Management Page

• Adding The Links Administrator Page
• Setting Up The Basic Structure Of The Page
• Adding a display of the current categories
• Add New Categories
• Getting The ID Of A Newly Added Category
• Debugging A Failed Typecast
• Solving A Database Null Field Problem
• Changing A Field To Not Allow Nulls
• Checking Our Table Changes By Attempting To Add A New Category

Part 4 - Adding An Edit Category Function

Part 5 - Adding a Delete Category Function

Part 6 - Adding a Administrative List of Links

Part 7 - Approving and Editing Newly Added Links

Part 8 - Deleting Links

Part 9 - Moving Links To New Categories

Part 10 - Allow A Link In Multiple Categories

Part 11 - Forcing users to register before submitting links

Part 12 - Adding a Bot blocker to the New Link submission

Conclusion

In this set of tutorials, we developed a fully features links management system. We developed the system without a clear picture of the endpoint, and learned how to deal with errors and restructurings along the way to reach our finished system.

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