Mini Post – DotNetNuke and web.config problems
I could have Twittered this but I wanted to put it here: Every now and again I find myself refreshing my developer's copy of my project on my local computer from source control.
The way I have source control is primitive and probably incorrect. I tend to save ALL of my project (DotNetNuke included) into source control, so when I get a clean setup, I can basically run it out of the box.
This particular time, I was working with a different database than I normally do. Because of this, my source control wrote over my web.config and copied the wrong database settings, which resulted in the web.config pointing to a no-longer existing database.
When I loaded up my website, I was greeted with the installation wizard from DotNetNuke. "Okay," I thought, "Perhaps I forgot to update this particular database with the new DNN version." I clicked on next a few times and realized it was just the wrong database being referenced. I changed the web.config to be the correct database and credentials and all was well...
Or was it?
I loaded up my project and I was getting rather unhelpful "I need to put a ScriptManager on the page in order to use AJAX.net" error. I just couldn't figure it out! It worked before! Long story short, the DNN install wizard messed around with the web.config and broke a few things configured specifically to my install. Once I pulled up an older web.config, everything worked perfectly.
This wasted about 2 hours of my time (which I don't really have) and was easily avoidable if I was paying attention.
Lesson learned: Always be methodical with processes which you perform regularly. If something strange goes wrong within the process, it probably doesn't belong and should be approached very, VERY carefully.
ModalPopupExtender .Show() Caveat
I'll admit it... I don't mind AJAX.NET. In fact, I like a lot of the toolkit controls they provide. Because I am "chained" to .NET and DotNetNuke, I don't much of a choice when it comes to bleeding-edge technology.
One thing I tend to use frequently is the ModalPopupExtender. I had a requirement to show the modal popup when the page loads. Easy enough, I just instansiate the code and in the onLoad code-behind do mpe.Show().
However, this didn't work It gave me an ugly error. After sifting through a bunch of unhelpful forum posts online, I came across this issue in the AJAX Control Toolkit issue tracker. Reading through the description, you notice that the problem has to do with the fact that there is a missing semi-colon if you try to invoke the modal through server-side on a page with validation.
Because the modal I was programming would not need the validation on the page, I simply turned off validation when the modal was invoked. This worked like a charm. If you require validation with the modal, I strongly suggest you check out the issue tracker page.