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Guest
I am looking for some feedback, experiences, or design patterns with respect to implementing a branding system (or at least a brandable web application) in ASP.NET. Some questions that arose in my investigation thus far are:
1. What parts of the applications should be customizable? Which should not be? Where is the balance between a customer's ability to brand an application and the problems and support costs that ability will create?
2. How will a customer use the branding feature? Will the customer find it easy to brand, and be encouraged to use the feature? Does the industry have standards that will facilitate this for customers?
3. What systems will need to exist to support the branding feature? There can be substantial overhead in creating brandable applications, versus non-brandable applications. What infrastructure is needed to enable this feature for a given product, and is its return on investment acceptably positive?
To that end, I have considered both an ASP.NET server control based branding framework, and one driven off XSLT. I'm sure both approaches have advantages.
I think the best thing about Web Forms is the event driven model which they expose to a developer. You don't need to use the request/response model anymore, you just handle events raised by the controls.
With ASP.NET, the design is independent from code (if you use codebehind files).
Usually I receive a couple of XHTML design templates from a graphic artist, and if their is a form, I just change all the text fields to Web Controls, then add my validation controls and give the controls a class from the designer's CSS2 stylesheets. You can dynamically apply a stylesheet to any control at runtime with ASP.NET too. If you change the style then it will look different on the next request. To change which control has which style you would need to edit the .aspx file and reload the page.
If I need to generate a table from a database I make sure my repeater, datalist or datagrid has the same properties that the table in the template has and it works.
If the designer is using a tool like Dreamweaver or Visual Studio .NET, both of which support ASP.NET, then they might even be able to edit web controls from those tools.
XSLT offers itself as the industry-standard templating language written by the W3C, and today supported by nearly every major software vendor. It allows clean separation of data and layout, but doesn't offer any business logic facilities, state management, or server-side event handling.
Any feedback is appreciated.
Regards,
Mark A. Richman
1. What parts of the applications should be customizable? Which should not be? Where is the balance between a customer's ability to brand an application and the problems and support costs that ability will create?
2. How will a customer use the branding feature? Will the customer find it easy to brand, and be encouraged to use the feature? Does the industry have standards that will facilitate this for customers?
3. What systems will need to exist to support the branding feature? There can be substantial overhead in creating brandable applications, versus non-brandable applications. What infrastructure is needed to enable this feature for a given product, and is its return on investment acceptably positive?
To that end, I have considered both an ASP.NET server control based branding framework, and one driven off XSLT. I'm sure both approaches have advantages.
I think the best thing about Web Forms is the event driven model which they expose to a developer. You don't need to use the request/response model anymore, you just handle events raised by the controls.
With ASP.NET, the design is independent from code (if you use codebehind files).
Usually I receive a couple of XHTML design templates from a graphic artist, and if their is a form, I just change all the text fields to Web Controls, then add my validation controls and give the controls a class from the designer's CSS2 stylesheets. You can dynamically apply a stylesheet to any control at runtime with ASP.NET too. If you change the style then it will look different on the next request. To change which control has which style you would need to edit the .aspx file and reload the page.
If I need to generate a table from a database I make sure my repeater, datalist or datagrid has the same properties that the table in the template has and it works.
If the designer is using a tool like Dreamweaver or Visual Studio .NET, both of which support ASP.NET, then they might even be able to edit web controls from those tools.
XSLT offers itself as the industry-standard templating language written by the W3C, and today supported by nearly every major software vendor. It allows clean separation of data and layout, but doesn't offer any business logic facilities, state management, or server-side event handling.
Any feedback is appreciated.
Regards,
Mark A. Richman