Robert wrote:
Patrik Johansson wrote:
Robert wrote:
Patrik,
As Mike said, you can have multiple modules in a package and those modules can be under the same folder under DesktopModules. It really is just a matter of creating the .dnn manifest file correctly. take a look at the DNN blog module. Here is a sample from the DNN_BLOG.dnn file that shows multiple modules in one directory.
Hope this helps.
Good luck!
View_Blog
-1
View Blog
DesktopModules/Blog/MainView.ascx
View
View_Entry
View Entry
DesktopModules/Blog/ViewEntry.ascx
View
Sure, but what if you wanted to have a folder called "Modules" and then put in a few other user controls in there that had nothing to do with the blog-module at all, like say a Twitter module. Natrually you wouldn't want them to be the same extension in DNN and then the problems starts. At least I know of no way to do it, but that doesnt mean there is not such solution _)
I tried to paste the xml from the DNN_Blog.dnn file in my response but it parsed out the tags so what you saw wasn't very helpful.
trying to create the module install package using the DNN instance won't do what you want. You really will need to create the .dnn manifest file by hand. If you take a look at the blog module .dnn manifest you will cleary see how to set it up to create different modules. For the blog module they just happen to be all related to the blog engine but they are just stand alone modules that you can drop on any page. So, you can put all of your backoffice modules under one folder and create the manifest file to reflect that.
I have done this in the past without any issues. Though I do like to break it up into sub folders under the main module just for my own clarity.
I understand that trying to create the package through DNN isn't going to get you where you need but you can get there with just a little more effort.
You could even start by having your modules in different folders (just to start) then use the DNN packager to create the manifest for that module. then edit the manifest files and correct all the file paths to what you want and also edit the paths in the zip file. does that make sense?
good luck.
Overall I think you are correct, and in most cases, the manifest solution would probably be the preferred one. Thank you for sharing this. In our case, as this is a custom made enterprise application, we don't want to put to much effort into "distribution packaging" as we don't really have any distribution, besides moving the controls from development servers to test servers and then to production servers. But this is all in house and DNN is only a part of a much larger solution.
That said, I still believe the proper solution here would be that future versions of DNN was improved with regards to this. Haven't looked into the problem more in detail, but I guess is that all it would take is to allow the user to specify a package name instead of just taking the name of the folder containing the user controls, and the problem would be solved, right?