Justin Cooney

Web Development Tips and Examples

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about

I am a Senior Applications Programmer / Analyst with years of experience developing enterprise solutions using the Microsoft technology stack including C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, AJAX, IIS and SQL Server. I specialize in Web application development with a focus on building secure systems, integrating applications, and designing robust database structures.

  • Regular Expressions in .NET to Surround but not Replace Text Matches

    ASP.NET offers strong support for regular expressions in the System.Text.RegularExpressions Namespace. This is great since regular expressions are essential if you want to do anything beyond basic text manipulations and searches.

    You can read more about regular expression support in ASP.NET on the official MSDN page. The MSDN site also includes a few good getting started examples if you are interested.

    The Problem

    Recently I found myself facing an interesting task: I was building a simple search form which consisted of a text area and submit button on a Web page. The desired behavior was as follows:

    1. Users could enter a partial term into the text area and then click the submit button to search for that partial text match.
    2. The codebehind would search through an MS SQL Server database to find the partial matches
    3. The codebehind would render the search results into a GridView control with the partial match text highlighted with a yellow background color

    In theory putting this together is quite simple. The catch was figuring out how to highlight the partial text that the user searched for in the database results without changing the capitalization or other formatting.

    For example if the user searched for the term EXAMPLe TexT (notice the crazy capitalization), then the data results should highlight the correct results in the search result output using the capitalization/formatting found in the database. Or more simply: the results should not depend on the user-entered search term, but should show the original text from the database surrounded by HTML markup tags. So no matter what strange capitalization the user entered, the search results should be properly capitalized and highlighted.

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  • Call a JavaScript Function in an XSL StyleSheet of an ASP.NET XML Control

    Using an XSL stylesheet together with an ASP.NET XML control can be a great way to format the output of a database query. For instance a cool implementation is that you can embed an XML control within a ListView control so that you can output a tree-like structure in your ListView rather than the standard tabular structure.

    One surprisingly tricky thing is setting up a call to a JavaScript function within your XSL stylesheet that passes data from your database query dynamically. Unlike traditional ASP/ASP.NET you cannot directly output your database variable in your XSL markup (ie: along the lines of: Text='<%# Eval(“SomeData”) %>’). Instead, you first need to assign the dynamic data to a variable and then you need to use that variable to format your JavaScript call.

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  • Reviewing XSLT Template Match Patterns with ASP.NET

    As part of my ongoing dabbling with XML/XSLT & XPath in my VB.NET project I’ve decided to document some of the XSLT syntax I’ve found to be useful. In this particular article I will take a look at using templates to navigate the XML structure.

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