Recently when working on modules for clients and enhancements for my own modules I have been looking for better ways to utilize core DotNetNuke functionaltiy.  This article is the first in a long series of articles that I will be posting regarding using DotNetNuke core functions and controls in custom modules.  This first article will walk you through the process to add a simple popup calendar as an option for a user that is being prompted for a date.  Many people do not know that DotNetNuke provides a very nifty interface that handles all the hard work.  This article will walk you through this step by step, first with the .ascx code, then the .cs or .vb code, the lastly with a screencapture of the component in action.

A while back I received an e-mail from a user of my Expandable Text/HTML module that was reporting errors when trying to save the Header text value, which is input via the settings page of the module using the DNN Text Editor control.  I could not recreate the issue on my DNN 4.5.5 or 4.6.0 installations as it was always saving the records, however for this user no header was ever saved.  He was working with DNN 4.7.0 and could recreate the error on multiple pages.  So I installed a local copy of 4.7.0 and 4.8.2 for testing and was able to recreate the issue.

Regardless of the text input, when saving records with 4.7.0 values from the DNN Text Editor were not saved.  Looking into the issue a bit I found that by default starting in DNN 4.7.0 module settings controls are automatically wrapped in an update panel, which is something that doesn't work for the Text Editor control.  Now the easy solution would be to disable AJAX but that has a big effect on the rest of the site.  I looked around a bit and found the following snippet of code, this code MUST be executed on each page load and ONLY works for settings pages.

The above code requires that your module be built against DNN 4.6.0 or later as that is the first version that the DotNetNuke.Framework.AJAX items were included.  However this is a simple check to see if AJAX is installed, if it is, it finds the update button from the parent and then registers it as a postback control.  This MUST be done on every page load to ensure that it is always registered as a postback control.

I hope this helps someone out there as it helped me!  A special thanks to the person that first posted this fix to the DotNetNuke.com forums!

I just thought I would update the regular readers of this blog that I was NOT selected to present at OpenForce in Las Vegas this November.  Last year was a great opportunity to present even though presenting an incredibly shortened session.  I was looking forward to the potential honor of presenting this year but none of my 9 session topics were selected for the conference.

Congrats to all individual that were selected to present, I'm sure that OpenForce 08 will be a huge success.  I would also like to thank everyone here that provided me recommendations on topics for sessions and I hope that other speaker selections will meet the requested needs.

As always your support has been appreciated!