Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

Below is Chapter 8 from the book Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit by K. Scott Allen and Cristian Darie for Packt Publishing. This book provides information on the Community Starter Kit, which is freely downloadable from here. If you are looking to build a robust ASP.NET Web site, the CSK is a great starting point.

Creating a New Module

The next three chapters in this book will demonstrate various methods of customizing the CSK. Every community site will have different requirements to fulfill. Although the existing CSK framework offers a great deal of flexibility, having the entire source code available means you can add additional functionality to a site in an elegant manner. In this chapter, we will concentrate on creating a new module for the CSK. We will see how creating a new module allows you to add entirely new features which integrate seamlessly with the rest of the framework. In this chapter, we will implement a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) module.

Before we begin, let’s mention one caveat. The CSK is a living piece of software. It will undoubtedly gain additional features and modules from the developer community, so one question you may want to answer is, “Has someone else already written the module I need?” Once you’ve made the commitment to customizing the CSK with your own code, you’ll need to also think about integrating your code into newer versions of the CSK. If you stick to the current design used by the existing modules, chances are you’ll find that the upgrades are easier.

Module Design

Before you begin implementing a new module for the CSK, you will first want to have a firm grasp of the features you wish to add, and then decide if any of the existing modules shipped with the CSK can fulfill that functionality.

First, let us make a brief list of requirements for our community FAQ:

  • An FAQ should consist of a question, an answer, a description or introduction, and pointers to additional references.
  • Community users should have the ability to comment on and rank individual FAQs, as well as offer e-mail notifications when a new FAQ appears.
  • Community users should have the ability to submit a new FAQ subject for the moderator’s approval.

You could certainly create a list of questions and answers marked up in HTML and add the content to a community site using the HTML Page section type. However, the HTML Page section type offers limited user interaction (no comments, ranking, e-mails, or moderation).

Alternatively, the Articles section type could provide us with what we need, if we are willing to lump the FAQ answer and reference fields together in the article’s body text. For maximum flexibility in presenting information, we would prefer to keep these as distinct entities. With our requirements and direction set, let’s take a look at the classes and tables we will be building.

We know from the earlier chapters that the Community_ContentPages table will keep most of the information we need for an FAQ; for example, the author name, view count, and description. If we consider the question piece of the FAQ as the title, we really only need to store the FAQ answer and additional references as attributes. We will add a database table (Community_Faqs) as shown in the following diagram:

We can then build a class to hold FAQ information. As shown in the following diagram, the FaqInfo class inherits from ContentInfo, which holds most of the attributes for any content item. Every module also uses a utility class to retrieve, add, and edit content. For the FAQs module, this is the FaqUtility class (shown without method parameters).

We will also need to build classes for the code-behind pages that display and edit FAQs. We saw in earlier chapters how pages in the CSK derive from the SkinnedCommunityControl to allow themselves to be displayed with different skins. There are also a number of base classes with most of the behavior we need to add, edit, and display FAQs. The following diagram shows the class hierarchy that we will use for the FAQ code-behind classes:

We will also need to create WebControl-derived classes to display FAQ content. Typically, each attribute of our content will display in a distinct control, which allows a skin to lay out the content in whatever manner it sees fit. The following diagram shows the controls that we will use for this module, all of which ultimately derive from WebControl:

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