Reactions in the Community
Sometimes we feel our ears are burning at TheWebService!
I'd like to add a few words of thanks to some of our advocates on the web. We've recently had some positive comments from Marcus Zillman, Blogstorm and David Linthicum. We'll keep innovating to make sure there's always something to write about TheWebService!
You can also find us here:
Research Resources
Script Resources
WWW Reference
eCommerce Resources
Entrepreneurial Resources
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Building the community
This community section has been built entirely on thewebservice platform using ASP.NET so we thought we would let you know how it was done and how easily something like this can be created elsewhere.
There are three basic steps which cover the back end, the front end and linking them together.
Creating the tables to store information
The data is all stored within tables called MyTables. Creating MyTables allows us to instantly get a WSDL for the service of our choice to access the data anywhere. There are 6 MyTables used:
- Posts and comments, their content, the parent blog, thread or idea they belong to, the date and the IDs of the users who posted them.
- Blog posts, similar to posts and comments but without a parent.
- Forum threads, similar to blog entries but with extra information about sticky and locked topics.
- Ideas, similar to blog posts but with extra information about votes and status.
- Votes, the parent idea which was voted on and which user cast it.
- Users, containing information specific to the community section such as display name and signature.
These were all setup within the account section. We also created 4 MyViews which bring in the user information for blogs entries, ideas, threads and posts and comments.
Creating a page
The website was created using Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008. The pages are basic ASP Web Forms which use grid views to display the data returned from the service calls. The grid views are setup with custom item templates to the display the data in an attractive manner.
Hooking up web services
The webservice WSDLs were taken from the webservices MyTables section and added into Visual Studio using the Add Web Reference option. From there we create an instance of the webservice, a results object and the call the webservice select function to populate it. That brings the data into the page in just 3 lines of code! All that remains is to bind the results to our grid view and we're up and running.
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