Case Study: e-Library Module Development with DNN

Abstract

An Australian client decided to use Nova's technical expertise to develop a serious of DNN modules for an e-Library system, after we did a successful trial project for the client. The existing e-Library system is a library management system which was written by Microsoft Access. The existing system does not support multiple languages. As he foresaw they will have more and more users, the client required that the system to be re-written with DotNetNuke. As there were many relative tables in the old system, so the user interface of new system should be reasonable and friendly. As the whole system is a large and complex system it will be divided into many stages. Here our project is the first stage. This module should process many base data for the system.

Situation

• The database was provided by the client, which contained a lot of existing data. And all the relative tables were not stored in a DotNetNuke database.
• Basic data are distributed into many tables, which relates to each other. The client required that we should add an inserting feature to the dictionary table.
• The client wanted a clear user interface to manage those data.
• The client also wanted a easy-to-use query user interface to find a specific record.
• The user interface of the application should support paging feature.

Solution

Technology Required

• C#
• DotNetNuke
• ASP.NET AJAX
• jQuery
• Microsoft Ajax Toolkit
• Microsoft Entity Framework
• SQL Server 2005

Design

As the database was provided by the client and we could not modify any data structure in the database, we decide to use ORM tools to help us complete the Data Access tier. Other tiers are same as the normal DotNetNuke website. The following is the system schema diagram.

The Microsoft Entity Framework is easy to use, so we decided to adopt it. This module should provide a dynamic method to set the database connection string, so we consider adding a special field in the setting view and writing a Singleton class to keep the data context for Entity Framework.

In order to present the data relation between the book table and the relative table, we decided to make some tabs in this model with Microsoft Ajax Toolkit and use some grid view controls to load the relative tables on each tab. The following is the book view of this model.

In order to help client query the relative dictionary, we chose the dhtmlxCombo(a javascript dhtml control) control that can provide easy look-up and normal drop down features. Then we wrap them up and made a User Control and added a http handler to provide the look-up data. We just took the Modal Dialog Control from Ajax Toolkit to implement the query user interface as the following picture.

Benefits to the Client

• The module has implemented all the requirement.
• The client is very satisfy with our work and decides to go other stages with us.

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