Reasons and benefits for using a literal in asp over html - c#

I am fairly new to asp.net so this may seem like a stupid question, but:
I am attempting to modify a pre-exsiting help menu in a web-app.
In this menu the previous developer, just used three literals seperated by paragraphs and a button linking to a 100 page manual. (i know doesn't seem to be much help, hence why i was planning to update and fix this)
What i had in mind was setting something up like a menu that would link to the different section of the page when the title is clicked.
So something along these lines:
<h1>Menu Contents</h1>
<ol>
<li>section1</li>
<li>section2</li>
<li>etc</li>
</ol>
After the contents section i would have the first section with it's details.
What i am wondering is why would i use asp-literals over just sticking to html?
So basically i would like to know what are the benefits or reasons for using asp literals and i guess when is it that i should use them?
I've attempted to find the solution to this on my own, but the only related matters i have been able to find have to deal with people arguing whether literals or labels are the best option so it's not entirely helpful.
Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

You generally use literals if you want to be able to control the text you display programmatically. Say your page has a way to edit the section titles of your manual, for instance. Or say your manual is in multiple languages and you want the user to be able to set her language and see the section titles displayed in that language.
In your case, by what you're saying, I infer none of this applies and your manual is quite static. In that case I would stick to simple HTML.

Maybe it's been done that way so it would allow the links to be built dynamically, something like:
litMenuItem1.Text = "section1";
thus giving full control over the output? There are better ways to do that however.

Related

Custom PropertyGridEditor etc. for web part edit zone?

I want to change the appearance of the default editor parts, and am a little unsure of how to go about doing this, as there seems to be a surprising lack of documentation on the subject.
I've been able to create a custom declarative catalog with some trial and error and overriding the RenderCatalogPart method, and now wish to do something similar with my AppearanceEditor and PropertyGridEditor. I've tried just changing the style of the editor parts using CSS, but they are already arranged into tables which are impossible to get rid of. It's not even possible to just take the class as is, because the classes are sealed. So I'm basically stuck with having to write my own from scratch, I guess the questions are as follows:
1) How do I go about getting the information on the controls I need to render?
2) According to the documentation, I need to override the ApplyChagnes and SyncChanges methods - but I can't find any information on what I actually need to put in these methods.
3) On a similar note, is it possible to change the layout of the EditorPart itself, so that the AppearanceEditor, BehaviourEditor etc. are displayed side-by-side instead of on top of eachother?
4) Is there any way to have the page catalog displayed somewhere on the page, even in browse mode? I'd quite like to use it as a 'minimised' area, where users can send web parts they don't want immediately. At the moment they go back into the page catalog and users tend to just add a new part instead. I know that I can have multiple catalog zones on the page, which is great, but it only shows up in catalog mode.
Any help would be very much appreciated.
I didn't get any replies here, but I was able to figure out a way to do some of these.
In the end I decided to use reflection to get each public property on the web part that was WebBrowsable, and figure out what sort of control to display from the type.
The ApplyChanges() and SyncChanges() methods essentially just persist the changes from the page to the personalization blob and vice-versa. It's a matter of rendering some controls on the page, and mapping the values to the properties of the web part in these methods.
I don't think this is possible without writing your own.
Haven't been able to do this, but I don't imagine that it's possible sadly.

ASP.NET making a user controlled template with WebControls in them

I would like to make a system where my users can customize the look and feel of my webapp.
My goal is to give them an HTML editor and some predefined tags like [BUYBUTTON] and [PRODUCTLIST] they can use.
These tags should be replaced with actual ASCX controls so that they not only display the HTML output, but have any code-behind functionality.
A generic find and replace of text/html is easy, I can't wrap my head around how to make the controls embed into the template.
Can someone give me a little push in the right direction here? I will be doing this within a DNN module if it matters.
I would look at how DNN's XML Skin parser works.
I wasn't able to find any good tutorials but here is a link so you at least know what Im talking about.
Cheers.
I would suggest to look at the source code of announcement module, which is doing almost same thing that you want to do.
Only difference here is, announcement module is storing the template in settings, so you can have different layout templates for different modules on same page/portal.
Hope this will help you, happy coding

Sharepoint basics and any useful resources?

Sorry about having 3 questions in one but they are closely related and should be simple for someone familiar.
I'm used to coding Java/Obj C/PHP and am finding trying to modify a template somewhat annoying partly because it doesn't make sense but mostly I can't find resources.
I am editing a master template and have gotten the basics but some things still allude me.
With the ContentPlaceHolders, is there a way to use it more than once? Someone posted some code about how you can do this but it said I couldn't use code here.
Is there a way to modify these ContentPlaceHolders without using Sharepoint designer?
I thought using the SharePoint: tag would be a possible way around this, but I can't find any docos on the possible tags and what they do and where to use them.
Thanks for any help.
A ContentPlaceHolder in a master page only maps to one Content section in a page/page layout.
Yes, you can modify the contents of ContentPlaceHolder using code, building a control tree.
The SharePoint tag prefix is used to signify a different control namespace, but there is no sharepoint:placeholder
Maybe if you explain what you are trying to do, we might be able to advise you the best way.

Changes highlight in asp.net (like beyond compare) : Text or HTML comparison

I need to highlight changes(diff) between 2 database text fields in a asp.net application.
I'm used to "beyond compare" text compare, so the Ideal solution will do something like it, but if it just highlight the differences, that would be OK.
http://www.scootersoftware.com/moreinfo.php?zz=screenshot&shot=TextCompare
The content is HTML, so if it could compare the HTML rendered text, it would be even better.
So, i need a link or a control (free if possible) to do that job.
thanks
I think what you're asking is pretty complex. I can't find any control out there that will do this, but i did find this: Difference Algorithm for C#
It doesn't give you exactly what you need, but it's a good place to start.
I've just come across this question and it looks like there are more recent options - eg. Html Diff algorithm for .NET

How to allow simple HTML tags in comments or anywhere?

In my web application I am developing a comment functionality, where user's can comment. But I am facing a problem which is I want to allow simple HTML tags in the comment box. HTML tags like <b>, <strong>, <i>, <em>, <u>, etc., that are normally allowed to enter in a commenting box. But then I also want when user presses enter then it will be automatically converted into breaks (<br /> tags) and get stored into database, so that when I'll display them in the web page then they'll look like as user entered.
Can you please tell me how to parse that user entered only allowed set of HTML tags and how to convert enters into <br /> tags and then store them in database.
Or if anyone have some better idea or suggestion to implement this kind of functionality. I am using ASP.NET 2.0 (C#)
I noticed that StackOverflow.com is doing the same thing on Profile Editing. When we edit our profile then below the "About Me" field "basic HTML allowed" line is written, I want to do almost the same functionality.
I don't have a C# specific answer for you, but you can go about it a few different ways. One is to let the user input whatever they want, then you run a filter over it to strip out the "bad" html. There are numerous open source filters that do this for PHP, Python, etc. In general, it's a pretty difficult problem, and it's best to let some well developed 3rd party code do this rather than write it yourself.
Another way to handle it is to allow the user to enter comments in some kind of simpler markup language like BBCode, Textile, or Markdown (stackoverflow is using Markdown), perhaps in conjunction with a nice Javascript editor. You then run the user's text through a processor for one of these markup languages to get the HTML. You can usually obtain implementations of these processors for whatever language you are using. These processors usually strip out the "bad" HTML.
Its rather "simple" to do that in php and python due to the large number of functions.I am still learning c# .lol. but havent yet come across the function.The chances are that it exists and all you need to do is search for it.I mean a function that can take the user input,search for the allowed tags (which are in an array of course) and replace the <> with something else like [] then use a function to escape the other html tags.In php we use htmlentities().
Something like
<code>
$txt=$_POST['comment'];
$txt=strreplace("<b>*</b>","[b]*[/b],"$txt");
$securetxt=htmlentities($txt);
$finaltxt=strreplace("[b]*[/b]","<b>*</b>","$securetxt");
//Now save to Db
I'm not sure, but I think you have to escape html characters when inserting in database and when retrieving echo them unescaped, so the browser can see it just like html.
I don´t know asp.net, but in php there´s an easy function, strip_tags, that let you add exceptions (in your case, b, em, etc.). If there´s nothing like that in C# you can write a regular expression that strips out all tags except the allowed ones but chances are that such an expression already exists so it should be easy to find.
replacing \n (or something similar) with br shouldn´t be a problem either with a simple search and replace.
This is a dangerous road to go down. You might think you can do some awesome regexes, or find someone who can help you with it, but sanitizing SOME markup and leaving other is just crazy talk.
I highly recommend you look into BBCode or another token system. Even something untokenized such as what SO uses, is probably a much better solution.

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