Recipe: Dynamic Site Layout and Style Personalization with ASP.NET

.NET: ASP.NET: Themes

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<h4><em><strong>Themes</strong></em></h4> <p><em>Themes in ASP.NET (since 2.0) are similar to cascading style sheets (CSS) in that both themes and styl ...

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ASP.NET 2.0 Dynamic Themes

brent's blog — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 19:40:21 GMT

I have tried on several occasions to hook up dynamic themes to user accounts or session variables but

re: Recipe: Dynamic Site Layout and Style Personalization with ASP.NET

Elsa — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 12:41:33 GMT

Hi,

i have almost the same code u have above and i'd like to give the user more options, by allowing him to pick colors from a color palette(containing a huge number of colors). So what i need is to retrieve the value of the colors used in the .css from DB or XML file.

Can u help?

re: Recipe: Dynamic Site Layout and Style Personalization with ASP.NET

Thacker — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 20:53:00 GMT

Scott-

Thanks for this tutorial.

To you or anyone--

When changing Themes, what is the best method for handling variance in styles for Internet Explorer?

Currently reference a conditional comment within Master Pages to load IE style sheets. However, when using dynamic style sheet or Theme selection, the loaded IE styles from the conditional comment interfere with the selected

Theme. What are some viable alternatives for handling styles within Internet Explorer?

Thanks.

re: Recipe: Dynamic Site Layout and Style Personalization with ASP.NET

ScottGu — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 07:07:33 GMT

Hi James,

The redirect is necessary in cases where you are changing the theme -- since the theme can only be applied at the beginning of the request.

What you could do is to change the Response.Redirect statement to instead be:

Response.Redirect(Request.RawUrl)

This will redirect you to exact same page that the user is already on - in which case they shouldn't notice that a redirect happened.

Hope this helps,

Scott

re: Recipe: Dynamic Site Layout and Style Personalization with ASP.NET

James — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 08:41:17 GMT

Hi Scott,

I have same question as Jon

Is there anyway to avoid Response.Redirect("default.aspx") statement?

This always redirects the user to default.aspx page, instead I would like the theme to be applied on current page without redirecting to another page. I can achieve this by removing the response.redirect statement but I will have to press the button twice.

Another solution will be redirecting to master page(which contains the personalize theme options), if thats allowed.

As you suggested I've tried using Request.Form inside Page_PreInit() on master page then applying the value by Page.Theme but the result is same.

Thanks

James.

re: Recipe: Dynamic Site Layout and Style Personalization with ASP.NET

ScottGu — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 15:08:54 GMT

Hi todd,

The default Profile Provider stores information as a blob, but you can use an alternative provider to store the properties as columns in a database. This then allows you to query against them using regular SQL.

Here are two profile providers you might want to check out that do this:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/01/10/435038.aspx

and

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/10/13/Tip_2F00_Trick_3A00_-Source_2F00_Documentation-for-Simple-ASP.NET-2.0-SQL-Providers-Published.aspx

Darren also has a good book on web parts that you might want to check out here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193239477X/varioussite07-20

Hope this helps,

Scott

re: Recipe: Dynamic Site Layout and Style Personalization with ASP.NET

todd — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 02:59:50 GMT

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the feedback. Actually there will be a UI layer between the user and the actual theme (or css) so the user will be not be aware of the implimentation. I guess I wasn't clear on that, but the user will be setting properties on some web form and the app code will programmatically handle the modification and persistance of the theme or css.

The idea of custom sql provider for the themes had crossed my mind. I was hoping one existed or that someone else had come across this problem and handled it a specific way.

Since I'm mostly a enterprise server-side guy it's quite possible I'm already going down the garden path on how to manage the UI customization. I've looked at using web parts and it was overkill for what I wanted. Also the personalization provider persists all the presonalization info as a blob so I can't query the data for other application purposes. (For example, how many people are using the xyz property of the navi window?).

well, thanks for the feedback scott, I appreciate it.

Todd