Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 35: Building Applications Using Windows SharePoint Services Data 973
complicated because of several factors, including security, access to style sheets, image
objects, and so on. In addition, to use a Web Part within the confines of an ASP.NET site
requires Windows SharePoint Services extensions to be installed on that site.
As is usually the case, and as it is with our example, our Windows SharePoint Services
site and ASP.NET sites are completely isolated from one another. The general
assumption is that to provide security, the ASP.NET site users should have zero access to
the Windows SharePoint Services site or its objects. Although we have both sites on the
same machine, using TCP/IP, these two sites could be in London and New York City.
To accomplish our goal of displaying the data from an internal Windows Share-
Point Services site to an external ASP.NET site, we will use a direct connection to the
Windows SharePoint Services database and use a DataList control in ASP.NET to display
the data directly from the database table.
Getting to the data is the first requirement, and the key to this is accessing the
GUID for the list, as we did in the previous section. This key enables us to pull the
data from SQL Server to use it as we need to in the ASP.NET page.
Updating the Home Page In our example, we left our ASP.NET site with a single
page named Default.aspx and referred to it as the home page. We added a single
image to it to test the site and make sure it was operational.
For the next steps and to keep the example simple, we are going to add our
functionality to a new page named ProbSolutionKB.aspx. We’ll add a link to it from
the home page (Default.aspx) so that we can access it for testing. Open Visual Studio
and open the project created for the ASP.NET site (in our example, port 383).
In the original setup, we set the Default.aspx page to be the start page of the
project when we run the application. If you have not done this, you should do it
now. In Visual Studio Solution Explorer, right-click Default.aspx and select Set As
Start Page from the menu.
To start off, we want to make this example more realistic by making the home
page look a little better. (This is not required.) We’re going to modify the Default.aspx
page (which is the home page for the site) by adding a heading to it using a table and
adding a new image. We’ll also add a link to the new page to be created.
In Visual Studio, first add the image for the How Cool Version 2 product,
HowCoolV2sm.jpg (or any other image). (You can even keep the CoffeeBean.bmp
we used in the setup if you prefer.) Regardless of how you choose to use Visual
Studio—that is, whether you use the Design mode or code by hand—we want to
accomplish the following tasks:
■ Add a background color to the page.
■ Create a main table that will surround the page objects.
■ Create a table within the main table to handle our page layout.
■ Add the image to the page as a heading logo.
■ Add a link to the page to be created.