Creating a DotNetNuke inline skinobject

Last week I was asked to come up with a way to use the Page Icon in DotNetNuke as a source for a multi lingual enabled image on a page. Although this could have been done by creating a skinobject, I decided to pull this one off by creating an "inline" skinobject.. by lack of a better term.

Before we start, there are a few things we need to keep in mind:

• because the page icon is selected through the DNN interface, we need one location that is used as default location, without locale
• DNN Admin pages use page icons, so we need to exclude those (as they are not located in the portal root)

First we start with adding a server side script block, with an asp.net PageLoad eventhandler, to our skin. This is done in the .ascx file of the skin, location in the file does not matter. Like this:

   1:

next, we will use a new literal control in the skin to add the code for our image to, like this:

   1:<asp:Literal ID="litMyImage" runat="server" />

The code in page_load will look like this. Don't worry, i will explain

   1:

First we start off by checking for the existence of the iconfile:

   3:If (Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(PortalSettings.ActiveTab.IconFile)) Then

Next we check whether the page is an admin tab:

   4: If Not PortalSettings.ActiveTab.IsAdminTab And Not PortalSettings.ActiveTab.IsSuperTab Then 

Next, we get the 2-letter ISO code for the current culture:

   5: Dim Locale As String = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName

Next, for the default locale (in this example the default is nl-NL), we use the iconfile as available in DotNetNuke:

   7: If Locale = "nl" Then

   8:                    myImageFile = PortalSettings.ActiveTab.IconFile

For all other locales, we need to do some calculating with the path information. What I'd like to do is to use this for the default locale: [portalroot]/[somepath]/iconfile.ext, and this for all other locales: [portalroot]/[somepath]/[2-letterisocode]/iconfile.ext. We need to do some cutting and pasting in the original path that DNN reports for the icon file:

  10: Dim myFile As String = PortalSettings.ActiveTab.IconFile.Substring(PortalSettings.ActiveTab.IconFile.LastIndexOf("/") + 1)

  11: Dim myFolder As String = ""

  12: If PortalSettings.ActiveTab.IconFile.LastIndexOf("/") > 0 Then

  13:                        myFolder = PortalSettings.ActiveTab.IconFile.Substring(0, PortalSettings.ActiveTab.IconFile.LastIndexOf("/"))

  14:                        myImageFile = String.Format("{0}/{1}/{2}", myFolder, Locale, myFile)

  15: Else

  16:                        myImageFile = String.Format("{0}/{1}", Locale, myFile)

  17: 

  18: End If

Finally, we assign the value of the literal control with our image tag:

  20:                litMyImage.Text = String.Format(""{0}"" style=""width:140px"" src=""{1}{2}"" />", PortalSettings.ActiveTab.Title, PortalSettings.HomeDirectory, myImageFile)

I would agree that this is some work, however, we now have the option of a multilanguage page icon in our page. Of course a skinobject would also have worked, but the nice thing about this solution is that it will just work in this particular skin. Also, you can just package the skin and install it on a different installation and it will still work. In a sense you now have the option to include a skinobject with your skin.

Of course... you will be able to do that with DNN 5.0 anyway, but in a way this brings a great DNN 5.0 feature to DNN 4.x

The code in this blog was tested on DNN 4.9.0