I spent half of my Sunday searching for an answer why my new created controls would not fire the Page_Load nor the Page_Init events. I went through blogs and forums, but none of the answers I found were valid in my case. The few references to dnn specifically were questions that never got an answer.

I did find the solution and since this question never received any answer, I feel I should share my findings with the community for those (beginning) developers, struggling over the same issue.

The events started firing only after I had modified the manifest file to include the new controls and after I subsequently ran that manifest file in dnn ("repair installation"). For the new view (I called TabView) I entered a node under <modules><module><controls>:

<control>

    <key>TabView</key>

    <title>NewsDesk Tab View</title>

    <src>DesktopModules/KhmerSupport.NewsDesk/TabView.ascx</src>

    <type>View</type>

    <helpurl></helpurl>

</control>

The control TabView.ascx must also be included in the <files> section of course, but that is not related to the firing of the Page_Load event. Another control that was built to be used inside my View controls (TaggingControl.ascx) - that only needed to be included in the <files> section of the manifest


One might think the manifest file is an issue at the end of the development cycle. I've learned my lesson now. That "half of my Sunday" may easily have been 10 hours, while under pressure to deliver a demo - yet it got solved

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The one-eyed in the land of the blind.

Thank you.

I finished the demo, one day late, but I had to use some work-arounds I am most unhappy with. To begin, the TabView control cannot be used. DotNetNuke automatically assigns the default admin skin to the TabView control. I can change skin and container by hijackking the onload event in default.aspx.vb/cs. That's how DSLocalizator does it. But since DSL already uses this and produces compiled code inside a dll, I cannot do that.

For my demo, I have tweaked DSL source to fulfill some of the functions NewsDesk should do - but that is a solution that is unsustainable. Yet, this was not enough. During the onload event, I can still change skin and container, but I cannot copy modules from other tabs. While TabController.CurrentPage.Panes does indeed return the panes of the skin applied to the TabView, using this TabController to copy modules to one of its panes leads nowhere. Debug sessions seemed to indicate that the TabControler tries to write the modules to the view tab.

Completing a tabview tab with publicity and other messages from the marketing staff is quite essential. I had created an xml reader to read the information from a "template" and intended another module to manage the distribution of these marketing modules over the message base. I still hope to find a way to pick up this idea again.

The solution I implemented for my demo was to create a completely new tab, not visible in the navigation system. That tab contains advertising already and one instance of my NewsDesk. By checking  HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString, the NewsDesk module is able to find out that it is in a pseudo-tabview and in that case, it moves the newsitem title to the ModuleTitle. In my real tabview, I could not access that module title, I could only access modules from the module view (i.e. the normal 'View' control).

So my demo is ready, but my application is far from ready to be shared with the community. Sorry, but I'll keep working on it until it is

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The one-eyed in the land of the blind.