10: Building a Web Forum in Visual Studio .NET

Maker Code 39 Extended in Visual Studio .NET 10: Building a Web Forum

The Forum application uses the five pages shown in Figure 10-1 These pages are described in detail in the following sections

The home page for the Forum application, Defaultaspx, is shown in Figure 10-2 As you can see, this page lists the forums and topics that are available at the forum site In this case, there are two forums and a total of five topics To view the threads in one of the topics, the user clicks the link for the topic In case you re wondering how the forums and topics are displayed, nested Repeater controls do the trick The outer Repeater control displays the forums; then, for each forum, the inner Repeater control displays the available topics (More about how to pull off this bit of programming trickery later in this chapter)

Messagesaspx Messages page NewThreadaspx Start New Thread page Figure 10-1: The page flow for the Forum application

The Threads page, shown in Figure 10-3, displays the threads in a given topic For each thread, the page lists the thread s subject, the e-mail address of the person who initiated the thread, the number of replies to the thread, and the date the thread was last replied to A GridView control is used to display this list Note that the thread subjects are links If the user clicks one of these links, the Forum application displays the messages for that thread, as described in the next section Notice also that beneath the list of threads are two links The first takes the user to the New Thread page to create a new thread The second link takes the user back to the forum s Home page

When the user clicks one of the threads in the Threads page, the messages for that thread are displayed, as shown in Figure 10-4 This page displays the topic name and the thread subject, followed by the thread s original message and any replies Note that each message is preceded by a header that identifies who posted the message and when

If the user clicks the Start a New Thread link from the Threads page, the New Thread page is displayed, as shown in Figure 10-5 This page simply lets the user enter his or her e-mail address, a subject line, and the text for the thread s initial message Then, when the user clicks the Post Message button, the new thread is written to the Forum application s database

Figure 10-6 shows the Post Reply page, where you can add a message to an existing thread To post a reply, you must enter your e-mail address and the text of your reply, then click the Post Reply button This updates the database, then returns the user to the Messages page

The database for the Forum application requires the following four tables: Forums Topics Threads Messages Figure 10-7 presents a diagram that shows how these tables are related, and the following sections describe each table individually

The Forums table stores information about each forum supported by the Web site Table 10-1 lists the columns defined for this table

Table 10-1

An identity column that provides a unique ID number for each forum supported by the site This is the primary key for the Forums table The forum s name A short description of the forum

VARCHAR(255) VARCHAR(255)

The Topics table stores information for each of the topic areas available to users Table 10-2 lists the columns defined for this table

Table 10-2

An identity column that provides a unique ID number for each topic area supported by the site This is the primary key for the Topics table