It's a new year and thankfully the work inside in Dragnet Systems shows no signs of slowing down. VGWines.com is a brand new online store for an existing wine retailer based in Kerry, Vanilla Grape Wines Ltd.

The store uses Dragnet Systems own online store software. We have rebuilt the front end engine to make it easier for our in-house designers to build templates for any new stores going forward. It will also help increase the speed at which we can build new stores for clients now which is fantastic news.

It was interesting to note that due to legal issues with selling alcohol online VGWines.com can only sell to Irish consumers. This is the first time one of our stores has been faced with such a restriction but it makes sense. As always Rebecca has done a fantastic job with the design of the site and it definitely has a perfect 'wine' mood about it. I'm getting thirsty just looking at it :)

To read from a Web.Config file using C# is very easy to do. Let's say we have an appSettings tag in our Web.Config that holds the website title. Inside in our web.config you would have something like this:

To get .net to read this value all you need to do is add this to your code behind page on your site. Be sure to add the System.Web.Configuration namespace as this is not added by default.

using System.Web.Configuration;

//read in the SiteName tag from web.config
string MySiteName = WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SiteName"];

You might also want to write to your web.config file to allow the end user to update this data. To do this you must ensure that the Network Service user (or the ASP.NET user on WinServer 03 or earlier) has modify permissions on your website root folder.

Without the correct permission you will get the following error if you try to add the code below:
An error occurred loading a configuration file: Access to the path 'c:\inetpub\wwwroot\yourwebsitefolder\py39wsfg.tmp' is denied.

Assuming you have setup the correct permissions this code below will allow your web app to write to the web.config file.

//update the SiteName tag in web.config with a new value
Configuration config = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration("~");
config.AppSettings.Settings["SiteName"].Value = "New Site Name Value";
config.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Modified);
ConfigurationManager.RefreshSection("appSettings");

View Demo | Download Source

I was recently asked to look into making a JQuery UI dialog box (aka a modal box) work with asp.net. I thought it would be straight forward but as with anything in asp.net it turned out to be a little bit trickier than I had initially thought. Part of the problem was that I wanted to put the dialog box on an asp.net submit button and depending on the user's choice either submit the page or cancel the action.

Thankfully I stumbled across this great article over at DeviantPoint. It was pretty much exactly what I needed. However, for my example I needed to only show the dialog box if any of the checkboxes on the screen were not selected. In other words a normal postback would occur if every check was selected but if there were any checkboxes not selected the user would be asked to confirm their action.

If you take a look at my very basic demo page you will see exactly what I'm talking about. You will find all of the code within the source files I have posted for download but below is a brief overview of what is going on.

View Demo | Download Source

HTML used:

    
    
    

        
This is a top class widget. Features include...
        
        

    
        

            Below are the required items for this product to function correctly:

            Required Item 1
            Required Item 2

            Required Item 3 
            Required Item 4

        
    

    

        For this widget to function correctly you need to make sure you have all the required parts. Are you sure you wish to continue?

    

    

        
    

    

Javascript used:

C# Codebehind:

if (!Page.IsPostBack)
        {
            //this line is used to hold the exact postback function call used by the asp.net button
            this.MsgBoxContinue.Value = Page.ClientScript.GetPostBackEventReference(AddToBasket, string.Empty);

            //ensure the postback message is blank on load
            PostBackMsgTest.Text = ""; 
        }

        if (Page.IsPostBack)
        {
            PostBackMsgTest.Text = "Content posted back successfully.";
        }

One of the annoying little things about the asp.net repeater is that if you have text in a <HeaderTemplate> this will be shown on screen even if the repeater is empty. Nine times out of ten you will actually want to hide the text and only show it if the repeater contains information. This can be done by doing the following:

First adjust your repeater so that on PreRender of the repeater you call some code from your code behind:

    
        
Header text inside my repeater
    
    
        ... show database values in here ...
    

Next on your code behind page put in the following to check if the repeater contains any values:

protected void MyRepeater_PreRender(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
   //check to see if the repeater contains any items and if not hide it
   if (MyRepeater.Items.Count == 0)
   {
      MyRepeater.Visible = false;
   }
}

Fire up your page and test the repeater with and without items inside it. You should notice that when the repeater is empty the header text is not displayed which is what we wanted to happen.

If you want to set the default value of a drop down list from a value being passed to you by a third party you should always include a check to ensure that your drop down contains the value so that you don't end up with some nasty compiler errors.

To keep things simple let's say I want to check if my drop down contains the value "MyValue". If it does I want to pre-select that option for the user. To do this I would use something like below:

if (MyDropDownList.Items.FindByValue("MyValue") != null)
{
    MyDropDownList.SelectedValue = "MyValue";
}

You can also search based on the text value of your drop down by using FindByText instead of FindByValue.

After many months of work I'm proud to announce my latest project HertzFlyDrive.com. This website was designed from the ground up provide Hertz with a more effective way to manage their car rental booking information and help speed up the booking process for end users.

This site has a lot of new features in it that I had great fun with including Linq to XML for the XML calls to Hertz, jQuery UI date pickers, a brand new jQuery expander made specifically for this project, contacting the database using JSON and jQuery, multiple languages, etc. The list of new tech on the site is nearly endless! I'm proud of the speed of the site compared to their older site considering all of the extras we have added to the forms. By comparison our new site loads roughly twice as fast as the older Hertz site.

It's not only raw speed that helps the end user experience but also the ease of use of the site. We rose to the challenge and set about making the site a breeze to use for users. Our new car selection page actually combines two processes in one. On the old site the end user was required to go through to two separate pages for booking a car and picking the accessories that they might want. On our site this is all done on the same page. We have also included a very nice clean way for the user to upgrade their car choice without forcing them to go back a page and forward again. Steps like these all help speed up the booking process for end users and provide a much smoother experience.

It's in the admin tools that we've really gone to town with features. There are loads of snazzy extras we've built into this system. With the old site that Hertz had there were no stats for bookings or facilities to update offers on their site. Our brand new admin tools let Hertz quickly and easily add/update/delete/order any offer for any country and/or language.

There is also a brand new email marketing tool built for this site that allows admins to send and track emails sent to customers. The emails sent can be stored and stats like number of opens, click throughs or completed bookings from an email message are all store in our system. Customers can opt out of the email marketing at any time and there is even an option for them to easily opt back in if they decide to change their mind later on.

Finally, we have provided Hertz with enough stats to keep them busy for years to come! Everything from 'how many child seats were bought?' to 'whats our most popular destination?' is available to the site admins.

We're hoping that this new web system will help drive more sales for Hertz and that end users find the site a joy to use. I'd love to hear what you think about the site so let me know in the comments below.

The majority of the time when displaying content to the end user you will want to order the data by certain criteria. More often than not you will want to sort by a specific column. If your data is in a DataTable how do you do that?

You need to convert your DataTable into a DataView, apply your sort and save the results back to your DataTable. Let's say we have a DataTable that holds details of all our customers and we want to order the information by their names. To keep things simple I will hard code in only 2 customer values here. You would order the information by doing the following:

using System.Data;

//create our datatable and setup with 2 columns
DataTable dt = new DataTable();
dt.Columns.Add("CustomerFirstname", typeof(string));
dt.Columns.Add("CustomerSurname", typeof(string));
DataRow dr;

//store some values into datatable
//just using 2 names as example
dr = dt.NewRow();
dr["CustomerFirstname"] = "John";
dr["CustomerSurname"] = "Murphy";
dt.Rows.Add(dr);
dr = dt.NewRow();
dr["CustomerFirstname"] = "John";
dr["CustomerSurname"] = "Doe";
dt.Rows.Add(dr);

//check to make sure our datatable has at
//least one value. For this example it's not
//really need but if we were taking the 
//values from a database then this would be
//very important!
if (dt.Rows.Count > 0)
{
   //convert DataTable to DataView
   DataView dv = dt.DefaultView;
   //apply the sort on CustomerSurname column
   dv.Sort = "CustomerSurname";
   //save our newly ordered results back into our datatable
   dt = dv.ToTable();
}

//display your datatable to the user by databinding
//to repeater/gridview