It recently began to annoy me that every time I want to redirect to a page I have to use a string. Not a big deal I know but when you have broken links it can reflect badly on you as a developer, so I began to look for some solution that would allow for the following.

• Refactoring: I need to be able to move a page around without having to find every string reference to it
• No Reflection: It’s slow I don’t want to have to use it when redirects happen often.
• Parameters: I want to be able to pass parameters to a function and make that become part of the get request, I want the logic for that to exist on the page being redirected to as that is where the parameters are being used, this will also help with refactoring, the plain ole redirect logic however would just exist on a base class, don’t want to have to rewrite for every page.

I knew the ideal situation would be if I could somehow use the fact that web application projects use the folder hierarchy for its namespace convention and end up being able to redirect to the page ~/Users/UserDetails.aspx?UserId=14 with the following command Users.UserDetails.Redirect(14);

Here is how I did it:

I have a web application project, let’s call it MyProject.Web

I have two pages called UserDetails.aspx and UserList.aspx in the folder Users.

They both inherit from the following base class:

They follow this pattern:

namespace MyProject.Web.Users

{

public partial class UserDetails: BasePage<UserDetails>

{

public static void Redirect(int userId)

{

Redirect(“UserId=” + userId.ToString());

}

}

}

Now because UserDetails and UserList are in the same folder I can simply call UserDetails.Redirect(selectedUserId) on the UserList and UserList.Redirect() on the UserDetails.
The only real disadvantage is that it could confuse people who discover a Redirect method on their current page that they can’t use to make it to another page.
However it should be abundantly clear to everyone what you are doing when they see it already written.
Also every time you move a class, remove or add a parameter, it will break on compile time not at run time.

Comments and feedback welcome.

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using System;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.Globalization;
using System.IO;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Threading;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Hosting;
using System.Web.SessionState;

public sealed class MockHttpContext
{
    // NOTE: This code is based on the following article:
    // http://righteousindignation.gotdns.org/blog/archive/2004/04/13/149.aspx
    private const string ContextKeyAspSession = "AspSession";
    private const string ThreadDataKeyAppPath = ".appPath";
    private const string ThreadDataKeyAppPathValue = "c:\\inetpub\\wwwroot\\webapp\\";
    private const string ThreadDataKeyAppVPath = ".appVPath";
    private const string ThreadDataKeyAppVPathValue = "/webapp";
    private const string WorkerRequestPage = "default.aspx";

    private HttpContext context = null;

    private MockHttpContext()
        : base()
    {
    }

    public MockHttpContext(bool isSecure)
        : this()
    {
        Thread.GetDomain().SetData(
            MockHttpContext.ThreadDataKeyAppPath, MockHttpContext.ThreadDataKeyAppPathValue);
        Thread.GetDomain().SetData(
            MockHttpContext.ThreadDataKeyAppVPath, MockHttpContext.ThreadDataKeyAppVPathValue);
        SimpleWorkerRequest request = new WorkerRequest(MockHttpContext.WorkerRequestPage,
            string.Empty, new StringWriter(), isSecure);
        this.context = new HttpContext(request);

        HttpSessionStateContainer container = new HttpSessionStateContainer(
            Guid.NewGuid().ToString("N"), new SessionStateItemCollection(), new HttpStaticObjectsCollection(),
            5, true, HttpCookieMode.AutoDetect, SessionStateMode.InProc, false);

        HttpSessionState state = Activator.CreateInstance(
             typeof(HttpSessionState),
             BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic |
             BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.CreateInstance,
             null,
             new object[] { container }, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture) as HttpSessionState;
        this.context.Items[ContextKeyAspSession] = state;
    }

    public HttpContext Context
    {
        get
        {
            return this.context;
        }
    }

    private class WorkerRequest : SimpleWorkerRequest
    {
        private bool isSecure = false;

        public WorkerRequest(string page, string query, TextWriter output, bool isSecure)
            : base(page, query, output)
        {
            this.isSecure = isSecure;
        }

        public override bool IsSecure()
        {
            return this.isSecure;
        }
    }
}

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Includes support for Linq and object data sources.

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Edit: If you have the debug and the release folder this may not work on the debug folder dll. It didn’t work for me.

We’ve got a 3rd party DLL that we use (not strong named) and I wanted to add it to the GAC. Alas! Only strong named assemblies are allowed in the GAC.

I’ve been trying figure this out for almost a week… couldn’t find much help on Google , so I thought I’d share.

Well, here is my solution (it works… not sure if it’s the best way though)

From a VS.NET command prompt, enter the following:

1. Generate a KeyFile

sn -k keyPair.snk

2. Obtain the MSIL for the provided assembly

ildasm providedAssembly.dll /out:providedAssembly.il

3. Rename/move the original assembly

ren providedAssembly.dll providedAssembly.dll.orig

4. Create a new assembly from the MSIL output and your assembly KeyFile

ilasm providedAssembly.il /dll /key= keyPair.snk

Viola!

You now have a strong named assembly.

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So far I’ve seen two implementations of ASP.Net wrapper on JqGrid, one involves a httphandler and the other involves using a web service. Both add extra work onto the gridview/datasource pattern.

Instead I had the JqGrid use a Callback Event Reference (Page.ClientScript.GetCallbackEventReference()) with async (a parameter) set to true, this allowed me to call back directly to the custom asp.net JqGrid control instance and access the DataSource.

This is not ideal, as it passes the view state to the server first but it is the simplest and cleanest going from ASP.Net GridView to JqGrid.

Other useful information

Inherit CompositeDataBoundControl and add the attribute
[PersistenceModeAttribute(PersistenceMode.InnerProperty)]
public DataControlFieldCollection Columns { get; set; }
in order to get
<My:Grid>
<columns>
<asp:BoundField….
working

implement CallbackEventHandler otherwise the Page.ClientScript.GetCallbackEventReference() won’t work.

I’d recommend using Rick Strahl’s ClientScriptProxy for registering your Javascript, it solves the problem of whether the page your control ended up on has a scriptmanager. Find that here: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/10246.aspx

Here are some pages I found helpful on JqGrid: (if I find any more I’ll add them)

http://www.nshaw.com/2009/01/jqgrid-and-aspnet-web-forms-with-json.html
http://geeks.netindonesia.net/blogs/cipto/archive/2009/04/03/jqgrid.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WCF/jqGrid.aspx

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Here is how to call a method with an out parameter using MethodInfo.Invoke, in this case the out parameter is the last one (int).

int parNum = 0;
string parText = “99″;
object[] methodParms = new object[] { parText, parNum };

MethodInfo methInfo = parNum.GetType().GetMethod(“TryParse”, new Type[] { typeof(string), typeof(int).MakeByRefType() });
methInfo.Invoke(null, methodParms);
parNum = (int)methodParms[1];
Console.WriteLine(“Parsed number:{0}”, parNum);

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Later on I discovered that I couldn’t seem to register any javascript from the control. Turns out that it wasn’t being registered because of the lack of visibility. .Net was treating it like an on/off switch even though I’d told it not to. It’s things like this that make me want to use ASP.Net MVC.

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I found the solution here:

http://damianedwards.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/setting-up-jquery-for-aspnet-web-forms-projects/

It essentially revolves around using the script manager to reference the JS files and using naming conventions so it knows which one to open where.

Edit: Don’t forget to download the hotfix or the -vsdoc won’t work.

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Initializing IIS Web Server...
Successfully created virtual directory 'ycmbuild'.
Granting IIS read access to the folder 'C:\Projects\YourClubMatters\Trunk\YCM\WebSite_deploy\Release'.
C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\WebDeployment\v9.0\Microsoft.WebDeployment.targets(676,5): error : Some or all identity references could not be translated.
Warning: Unable to grant IIS access to folder 'C:\Projects\YourClubMatters\Trunk\YCM\WebSite_deploy\Release'.
Done building project "WebSite_deploy.wdproj".
========== Rebuild All: 7 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========

The solution for me was to stop the web deployment project from creating the iis virtual directory, make a virtual directory pointing at say “c:\inetpub\vdir”, give the application pool it belongs to the same rights as the tfservice, edit team build project file adding a task that shuts down the parent website of the virtual directory, deletes all subdirectories and files in “c:\inetpub\vdir”, copies the published website that the deployment project creates to “c:\inetpub\vdir” and starts the parent website of the virtual directory.

I’m sure there are other solutions, I found that to be the simplest. Also, I used SDC Tasks to do all of this, very simple stuff.

What you add the the .proj file looks like this:

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Its essentially a couple of tips for using it in common situations. One of the handiest for me was the ability to start by selecting the year, which makes much more sense when entering a date of birth.

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