R – Sharepoint with ASP.Net Web Application

Architectureasp.netsharepoint

What I need to do is create a web application that can run inside SharePoint. It needs to be more involved then a web part and include many pages and a database. I know you can create a SharePoint application that goes under the Action bar, but I would like to create something that is run like how a site is. I would want a few tabs to show different sites, each running the same application, just showing their own data.

It looked like creating a site definition would be the best route to achieving this, but I have not been able to get it to become like an ASP.Net Web Application. Anyone know of any other project type or method that can be done to develop an ASP.Net Web Application that simply shows up in SharePoint? I know I can do it in a page viewer webpart, but that just seems like a cheap hack to create an IFrame and not the optimal solution. I don't need any true integration with sharepoint, other then using it for Authentication and a display mechanism. Our corporate intranet is setup using SharePoint, so anything that I build has to exist within it.

If anyone has any guidance, I would love to hear your suggestions.

Thanks!

Best Answer

It's actually pretty straightforward, at the basic level:

Create your ASPX pages with codebehinds in your own assembly - just like normal.
Use the Sharepoint master pages (look at the existing ones to mimic their styles and markup)
Create a Feature which adds a link to your "entry point" page(s) to the SP menu
Deploy your assembly to the GAC

Related Solutions

.net – ASP.NET Web Site or ASP.NET Web Application

Website:

The Web Site project is compiled on the fly. You end up with a lot more DLL files, which can be a pain. It also gives problems when you have pages or controls in one directory that need to reference pages and controls in another directory since the other directory may not be compiled into the code yet. Another problem can be in publishing.

If Visual Studio isn't told to re-use the same names constantly, it will come up with new names for the DLL files generated by pages all the time. That can lead to having several close copies of DLL files containing the same class name, which will generate plenty of errors. The Web Site project was introduced with Visual Studio 2005, but it has turned out not to be popular.

Web Application:

The Web Application Project was created as an add-in and now exists as part of SP 1 for Visual Studio 2005. The main differences are the Web Application Project was designed to work similarly to the Web projects that shipped with Visual Studio 2003. It will compile the application into a single DLL file at build time. To update the project, it must be recompiled and the DLL file published for changes to occur.

Another nice feature of the Web Application project is it's much easier to exclude files from the project view. In the Web Site project, each file that you exclude is renamed with an excluded keyword in the filename. In the Web Application Project, the project just keeps track of which files to include/exclude from the project view without renaming them, making things much tidier.

The article ASP.NET 2.0 - Web Site vs Web Application project also gives reasons on why to use one and not the other. Here is an excerpt of it:

You need to migrate large Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications to VS 2005? use the Web Application project.

You want to open and edit any directory as a Web project without creating a project file? use Web Site project.

You need to add pre-build and post-build steps during compilation? use Web Application project.

You need to build a Web application using multiple Web projects? use the Web Application project.

You want to generate one assembly for each page? use the Web Site project.

You prefer dynamic compilation and working on pages without building entire site on each page view? use Web Site project.

You prefer single-page code model to code-behind model? use Web Site project.

Web Application Projects versus Web Site Projects (MSDN) explains the differences between the web site and web application projects. Also, it discusses the configuration to be made in Visual Studio.

Javascript – Change the selected value of a drop-down list with jQuery

jQuery's documentation states:

[jQuery.val] checks, or selects, all the radio buttons, checkboxes, and select options that match the set of values.

This behavior is in jQuery versions 1.2 and above.

You most likely want this:

$("._statusDDL").val('2');

Related Topic