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Been there done that before -- ugh!

By host on Friday, June 26, 2009 5:20 PM

I required an enhanced IFrame Module that will "blur" the parameters being passed to the page referenced in the IFrame. The issue is passing parameters in clear text is considered "bad form" by Web Inpection tools such as HP's WebInspect. While the DNN site in a intranet site, I guess the need to "blur" the parameters does have merit.

So I need to revise the IFrame to "blur" the parameters -- I am going to modify the parameters passed in one of two ways -- Base64 encode the value string -- this will make the effort of determining what is passed difficult for a snooper of the HTML source. The other way will be to Encrypt the data using the standard encryption provided by .Net.

However is creation of the module turns into a real problem with multiple control definitions for a module.

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You have Comments!

By host on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 9:01 PM

As I mentioned in a recent Blog posting, I am attempting to blog more. With blogs postings come comments to my blog -- this is a appreciated and unfortunately sometimes overlooked. So I have added a new report to my site that displays recent blog comments. This way when I do my daily site review I can check if I have comments that require responses.

I also have missed some feedback messages -- even though they generate an email, I do miss them so I have a report to display all the unanswered feedback messages.

You can use the Reports module to display the information or one of the several other SQL grid modules to display the report. For obvious reasons I use SQLGridSelectedView.

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Life would be easier if everything was new

By host on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 4:46 PM

The new release of DNN 5.1 does have a small (very small) issue when converting from V4 DNN site. The problem exists with a key and the conversion script does not drop the key due to a naming issue. There is a fix and is available from the support wesite.

If you are upgrading from 4, please read. The issue is simple to fix as even if you don't you should not encounter any problems.

I have included Charles Nurses' comments and script below - a direct copy from the support.dotnetnuke.com site.

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A new colour - whatever

By host on Sunday, June 21, 2009 9:35 PM

Recently, I have been doing a fair amount of work with fonts and colours (or color depending if you were not born under british rule).   During this work, I discovered a colour that I didn't know existed. The color is "transparent". In .Net world, this color will allow the underlying color to be shown. Brillant!

So where does this come in very handy -- well consider things like border colours -- often the border colour is pre-defined and you are allowed to change it, but in the world of DNN and skinning, what is the correct colour today, may be horrible when you re-skin your site.  In this case, transparent works perfectly. Instead of a colour - either a colour number or explicit colour name, use "transparent" and the problem is solved.

While this is no doubt known in the work of designers and skinner, this may be "news" to us more graphically challenged types.

Hope this helps Paul.

EDIT: Seems that IE6 and probably lower version will default "transparent" to black. Ugh!  ...

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Revised Add User Stored Procedure

By host on Saturday, June 20, 2009 3:47 PM

I wanted to create some testing data, so I began adding users by hand. One or two users is OK, but I wanted to add many so I started to play with the script that Mitchel Seller's had blogged in May, 2007 (here) . I wanted a stored procuedure I could use to add a user. I would then create a script calling this procedure as required. So here is what I developed ...

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Give Them a Break

By host on Thursday, June 18, 2009 9:09 PM

In the last few days, the DotNetNuke Web Site has been struggling. The recent move to dogfood the 5.1 Release Candidate has surfaced the worst possible type of error – a performance error based on load. This is probably the toughest error to determine and eliminate as it may be one issue or a combination of several.

I know there are many in the community that are not pleased at the current situation as it does publicly air the problem DotNetNuke Corp is having. I, for one, am more interested in the solution than the minor embarrassment that the Corp may feel. In the end, once the problem is found, I am confident the cross-checks and test will be put in place so this issue will not happen again which will lead to a better product in the long run.

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Day of DNN -- recap

By host on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 1:32 PM

Now that the dust has settled, I wanted to take some time and recount my time in Tampa at Day of DNN. As many have said it was a great day and I certainly agree.

The adventure started at Toronto Pearson Airport with my flight to Tampa on Westjet. The flight was rather common and I was lucky enough to have the seat row to myself, the plane being 75% full. Arrival at Tampa provided the first surprise – it was really hot. Toronto was cold in comparison, but I was not ready for +93F (34C) temperature.

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Reports Module - take a look what is available now

By host on Sunday, June 14, 2009 7:29 PM

I must admit the first version of the report module was viable, but lack many options I would perfer to see. Well the new version -- release this past weekend -- is worth a new look. While this release is just a minor release to correct some issue, the fact it is probably a the best time to take the module for a test drive.

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Ready to GO -- Presentations are ready.

By host on Friday, June 12, 2009 2:34 PM

I spent the day getting my presentation ready for the Day of DotNetNuke (www.dayofdnn.com) . Well they are at a point where I could tweak them all night and not really get any improvement. So it's time to put then down for a while and relax.

The big issue is the audience I will be presenting to - you know the first rule of presentations is know your audience - but this is going to be a bit tricky. I could get a group of all DNN pros ... gulp -- or a room of rookies. I am hoping for a mixture.

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Talking DNN in Tampa - at Day of DNN

By host on Thursday, June 11, 2009 9:01 PM

Well I made it down to Tampa and spent the day hanging out talking (amoung other things) about DNN. I know that a DNN ecosystem exists, but I find that description is so cold. So when meeting other DNNers, I really enjoy the passion and the energy the "ecosystem" provides.

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My how times have changed!

By host on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 10:23 AM

In the last few years, the number of way that someone can view your site has increased considerably. The growth in different browsers and the growth in cell phones, the change is amazing.

As you may have noted from other blog posts and several Dotnetnuke forum posts, I have been attempting to get people to move off IE6 to any of the current new browsers. So I was somewhat surprised by the following stored procedure in Dotnetnuke:

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So where is everyone from?

By host on Monday, June 08, 2009 9:59 PM

I was playing around with the functions and views described by EricVB in this blog entry and realized I could easily determine my international audence using one of the functions.

Eric created a function called udf_UserProfileField that generates a table result (MS-SQL 2005 or better) for a given profile field. All the user who have this value are returned.

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What modules are used on a page?

By host on Sunday, June 07, 2009 6:22 PM

When visiting the ODUG (Orlando DotNetNuke User Group) website, I noticed as a container with a title of "Modules used on this page". The container is minimized so you need to expand the container to see the report. The report details the containers used on the page.

So how is this done? The report modules is used to query the modules tables to display the modules for the current tab.

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Where is that Module?

By host on Sunday, June 07, 2009 9:26 AM

Ever needed to locate every page (tab in DNN old speak) where a module is used? This is often needed when updating a site and want to confirm that each use of the module converted properly.

So use this query:

SELECT t.taborder, t.tabid, t2.tabname AS [Parent Tabname], t.tabname, m.moduleid, m.moduletitle FROM dbo.tabs t JOIN tabmodules tm ON t.tabid = tm.tabid JOIN dbo.modules m ON tm.moduleid = m.moduleid JOIN dbo.moduledefinitions md ON m.moduledefid = md.moduledefid JOIN dbo.desktopmodules dm ON md.desktopmoduleid = dm.desktopmoduleid LEFT OUTER JOIN tabs t2 ON t.parentid = t2.tabid WHERE dm.friendlyname = "TMinus" AND t.portalid = 2 AND m.isdeleted = 0 AND dm.isadmin = 0 ORDER BY t.taborder

As you can see I have explicitly defined the friendlyname of the module -- in this case "TMinus"

...

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Somewhat secret hiding place

By host on Saturday, June 06, 2009 8:14 PM

Even wonder where all the settings for a module is kept ... in the ModuleSettings table - duh! Ok ... maybe it's not that obvious to some. But the ModuleSettings table holds the keys to the kingdom for certain modules. In fact, often the module export is just a copy of the items in the Modulesetting table for the specific module.

The table layout is straight forward ... ModuleID, SettingName, SettingValue. So if the moduleID is 400 then to view all settings for moduleID 400, execute the following select

Select * from ModuleSettings where ModuleID = 400 order by SettingName

This Select will return all the specifics settings for Module 400. Note: not all

ModuleID SettingName SettingValue --------- -------------------- -------------------------------------- 400 EventAfterMessage !!! 400 EventBeforeMessage until Vancouver Olympics 400 EventDisplay 14 400 EventDuringMessage Go Canada Go 400 EventProcess 1030...

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Where did all my allotted space go?

By host on Thursday, June 04, 2009 8:28 PM

Unless you are hosting your site on your own server(s), your hosting company will impose a limit on your disk space. Occasionally, you will see a posting in the DotNetNuke forums asking "Why is the database so big?" or "What table is using all the disk space"

So there is two ways to look at this ... via SQL Servier Management Studio (SSMS) or via SQL ... some hosting environments do not allow access via SSMS, so SQL is the only option.

The following SQL will display all the tables:

EXECUTE sp_MSforeachtable 'EXECUTE sp_spaceused [?]'

This statement uses the "hidden" Microsoft store procedure "sp_MSforerachtable" that will execute a given command against each table in a database. You will need to review the results to determine the largest table.

Alternatively, the following T-SQL will generate a list of tables in largest row count to smallest.

set nocount on

-- create table to hold name and rows -- cannot use in-memory as it will not work with sp_MSforeachtable...

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So when did you last update DNN?

By host on Wednesday, June 03, 2009 8:57 PM

While I have been playing with DNN V5 beta and RCs, I was interested in a forum post a few weeks ago that was asking how to determine the version of DNN. For long time users of DotNetNuke, this is a simple question answered on the Host page.

However, there are other ways to determine the version - primaryly the version table in the DotNetNuke database. But when did you perform your updates? This is what I began wondering. So I created a SQL SELECT that will return the dates of the update.

select Cast(major as varchar(2)) + '.' + cast(minor as varchar(2)) + '.' + Cast(build as varchar(2)) as [Version Number], Convert(varchar(17), Createddate, 113) as [Implementation Date] from {databaseOwner}{objectQualifier}version where versionid in ( select max(versionid) from {databaseOwner}{objectQualifier}version group by Convert(varchar(17), Createddate, 113) ) order by versionid desc

Note: I used the fact...

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Know your audience -- well at least how they look at you

By host on Tuesday, June 02, 2009 9:52 PM

In recent months new browsers have been released in to the wild - IE8, FF3, Crome... So do you know the breakdown on how your site is visited? In a forum post here I requested that DNN site owners help eliminate IE6. I aslo included a select statement you can use to determine your traffic.

select count(useragent) as [count], Case when charindex('MSIE 5', UserAgent) > 0 then 'IE5' when charindex('MSIE 6', UserAgent) > 0 then 'IE6' when charindex('MSIE 7', UserAgent) > 0 then 'IE7' when charindex('MSIE 8', UserAgent) > 0 then 'IE8' when charindex('Firefox', UserAgent) > 0 then 'FF' when charindex('Opera', UserAgent) > 0 then 'Opera' when charindex('Chrome', UserAgent) > 0 then 'Chrome' when charindex('bot', UserAgent) > 0 then 'bot' when charindex('slurp', UserAgent) > 0 then 'bot' when charindex('crawler', UserAgent) > 0 then 'bot' when charindex('spider', UserAgent) > 0 then 'bot' when charindex('jeeves', UserAgent) > 0 then 'bot'...

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Now What?

By host on Monday, June 01, 2009 12:11 PM

As many are aware, I work for a supplier to General Motor's here in Canada - specifically, Oshawa, Ontario. With the bankruptcy filing by GM in the US, it appears that the Canadian arm of the company has been spared the same fate. That is good news -- also good news is none of the remaining GM plants in Canada will be closed -- The Oshawa Truck Plant was closed May 14th, so we have had our share of loss.

Personally, it appears that my position is stable for the next while, but I may be off for several weeks while everything sorts itself out. Many of the part used by the assembly plants (for Camaro and Impala) are made in the US, so lack of supply maybe cause the plant here to close for a few weeks. However, efforts are being made to keep the down-time to a minimum.

To take my mind off everything, I will restart my blog entries to keep me focus of issues of self improvement. First off, I have been selected to speak at the “Day of DNN” in Tampa on June 13th. In fact, I will be presenting two sessions and I want to blog about the sessions and the whole experience. The two sessions are “SQL Tips and Tricks for DotNetNuke Site Administration” and “Administrating Back Office System with DotNetNuke”. I plan to blog on these issues over the next few weeks. Please follow along. Comments are welcomed and appreciated.

...

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