I recently upgraded to dasBlog 2.0 and went ahead and updated my site design while I was at it. With the new design, I wanted to use dasBlog's navigator links for the horizontal menu. However, the navigatorLinks macro is hard-coded with a vertically-oriented table structure. So I wrote a custom macro to provide the links in a simple unordered list that I could style with CSS. I started from the source code for the navigatorLinks macro and just replaced the HTML-generating bits. While I was tempted to consolidate the redundant logic, I avoided any other refactoring to save time. For those interested, my code is below. For more information on creating custom macros, read: Creating custom macros for dasBlog.
public class CustomMacro
{
protected SharedBasePage requestPage;
protected Entry currentItem;
public CustomMacro(SharedBasePage page, Entry item)
requestPage = page;
currentItem = item;
}
/// <summary>
/// Return the navigator links in an unordered list.
/// </summary>
public Control GetNavigatorList()
string fileName = "navigatorLinks.xml";
StringBuilder navigator = new StringBuilder("<div class=\"navigatorContainer\"><ul class=\"navigatorList\">");
string itemTemplate = "<li class=\"navigatorListItem\"><a class=\"navigatorListItemLink\" href=\"{0}\">{1}</a></li>";
try
string fullPath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(SiteConfig.GetSiteConfig().ContentDir + fileName);
if (File.Exists(fullPath))
NavigatorXml nav;
using (Stream s = File.OpenRead(fullPath))
XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(NavigatorXml));
nav = (NavigatorXml)ser.Deserialize(s);
foreach (NavigatorItem navitem in nav.Items)
navigator.Append(String.Format(itemTemplate, navitem.Url, navitem.Name));
else
NavigationRoot nav;
fullPath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/SiteConfig/" + fileName);
XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(NavigationRoot));
nav = (NavigationRoot)ser.Deserialize(s);
foreach (NavigationLink navitem in nav.Items)
return new LiteralControl("Add '" + fileName + "' to your SiteConfig directory<br />");
catch (Exception exc)
ErrorTrace.Trace(System.Diagnostics.TraceLevel.Error, exc);
return new LiteralControl("There was an error processing '" + fileName + "'<br />");
navigator.Append("</ul></div>");
return new LiteralControl(navigator.ToString());
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Tags: blogging
Design / Technique | Tools / Services
I'm an Internet technology business strategist, software architect, and development leader specializing in interactive marketing and social media. read more...
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