ASP.NET 2.0 Illustrated

13. Building Web Portals Customization is a big topic in application development. Users like to be able to change the layout, appearance, and behavior of their applicationsfine-tuning them to better suit their business practices and working ...

The ASP.NET 2.0 Portal Framework In reality, the home page of any Web site or Web application is a "portal" to that site or application. In general, the home page carries things like news, information, and of course links to the other ...

The WebPart Manager The WebPartManager object is the operation controller for all WebParts on a page, and any page that has WebParts must have a WebPartManager. You place a single instance on the page, and the manager will maintain a list of Web...

WebParts and Authorization By default, all users can browse pages with WebParts, but to customize a page, the user must be authenticated. Changing the DisplayMode of the WebPartManager, therefore, is only possible when the user is logged in; an er...

Zones and WebParts Once you have a menu, you need to decide upon the zones the page will have. A zone is a templated control that references all the WebParts for the current zone and synchronizes the layout, appearance, and colors of these WebPart...

Catalog Zones By default, users can remove WebParts from a page by clicking the Close link. The closed WebPart can be added back into a page by using a catalog. The catalog holds two sets of WebParts: those that the user has removed from the page ...

Editor Zones The Editor zone allows properties and behavior of WebParts to be modified by the user, and is displayed when the DisplayMode of the WebPartManager is set to WebPartManager.EditDisplayMode. The Editor zone displays one or more Editor p...

Connecting WebParts Together We've used the example of a weather WebPart several times in this chapter, and in early examples this used a ZipCode property to state the location to display the weather for. A better solution would be to have the Zip...

Summary In this chapter we have examined the portal framework supported by WebParts in ASP.NET 2.0, an architecture that allows users to customize the look and feel of Web pages. We first looked at what WebParts and portals mean, seeing how WebPar...