New ASP.NET website using DotNetNuke

Question

Currently using DNN 5.2.x and we are using only 1 portal on the site. We need to make a mobile version of the portal and eliminate most of the extra DNN stuff as info will be just displayed. So what we decided to do was create seperate ASP.NET Web Forms website and utilize the DNN providers (membership, roles, etc) to do the logging in. However we are currently having issues. The one in particular is ("unknown exception trying to write to log"). We've moved most of the DNN Global.asax (i.e. SimpleContainer instructions) file to the new website and added the necessary web.config sections and references however we get this error when a user logs in. We did copy over the same web.config machine key to the new website. The connection strings are also there (app settings and connection string sections and is named SiteSqlServer).

So my question is, has anyone created a new website around DNN without using DNN except for the membership? i.e. no modules, no skins, etc. Just validate user and get roles.

If you have what needs to be done to get DNN 5.2.x (or later) to log a user in and return the roles, could you post your steps?

Answer 1

The default DNN login is based on ASP.NET membership. If all you really want is the login feature, it will be MUCH MUCH easier to simply use the ASP.NET membership directly than try to rip it out of DNN.

What you are trying is not impossible, but certainly will require substantial patience with trial and error.

Answer 2

For only validation users and getting roles you could write your own simple providers that utilize dnn special tables in the databse like (Users, Roles, UserRoles, Profile etc). The table User is associated with the aspnet_Membership and aspnet_Users standard tables via the Username field.

Answer 3

There are many options which are open for you.

1. If you really don't want to digg into complecations of how to integrate the dnn membership and role provider will work, you can check dnn single sign on
2. Another option is to have your webforms application as a subfolder in your dnn website. that way you don't have to do much effort and you will have all the good things ready to get started. even you can directly convert your skin to master page and reuse almost all the css and image related suff

In addition to above, I also suggest another smart way to do this. Since you are considering a mobile site, why don't you try and detect the browser using Request.Browser and create a separate skin for dnn that is of smaller size. We can easily switch skins dynamically for service requests.

I hope this will help. If you have more questions regarding this, I will be happy to help. Just drop me and email and I will try to help you get as close as possible to get you going.

Good Luck

Answer 4

This is the route we took. We basically implemented DNN in the mobile version of the website. Except we only utilized the User Membership features of DNN. To do this we had to use all the same core DNN dll's and also include all the "bootup" features in the global.asax file. We also had to on every request inject a UserInfo object into the session context. I forget the key name for the UserInfo oject used but it is used by DNN and must be set in a DNN handler that we did not incorporate. Other than that it works perfectly. We have the ability to get all the roles a user is in and etc.