DotNetNuke Online Help

I am continually baffled by how some people are always seeing conspiracies where none exists. The latest debacle was the launch of the DotNetNuke Online Help. Ignoring the fact that my Navigator module is used for delivery, I think it’s a fantastic feature. And for free, to boot. But some people didn’t see it that way judging from the posts in the DotNetNuke forums on ASP.Net. People complained abou tthe fact that the Online Help link went straight to DotNetNuke.com and changing it required a wee bit of work. How awful!!!

I guess people who have concealed from their clients the fact that DNN is what’s driving the $5,000 website they “developed” have a concern that their little secret will be exposed when the client clicks on that View Online Help link and discovers that they’ve been had. What amazed me even more is that these individuals expended more time and energy on complaining than finding a workaround that did not require a re-compile. Setting aside the sheer ludicrousness of people complaining about software created by volunteers, for free, under an amazingly liberal license, one has to wonder about the business ethics of these people. I have lost all respect for the people who expressed such views.

Anyway, I try not to get involved in these asinine arguments, because they are quite pointless. (So please don’t bother posting any comments about the above. It’s my opinion, on my blog and I don’t care to discuss it.) What I do like to do is solve problems, especially technical ones. And this is a nice, juicy problem.

So, if you don’t want to change the link in the database, and you don’t want to recompile, what other option is there. Well, turns out that the link text is localized. So it should be pretty simple…just blank out the text in the language file and you’re good to go. Not quite. If the localization text is blank, the control reverts to displaying the text value that’s defined in script.

Ah, an even more interesting problem. After mulling it over for a bit, I came up with an amazingly simple solution. Here’s what I did:

– Opened ~/controls/App_LocalResources/Help.ascx.resx in Notepad

– Found the line containing the key cmdHelp.Text and changed its value to:

<script language=javascript>this.parentNode.style.display="none"</script>

That did it. If it isn’t already obvious, what the text above does is insert some Javascript as the link value so that the hyperlink is prevented from being displayed.

That was fun.