Thomas Freudenberg

coComment for CS 2007 updated

Every day you can learn something new. Today it was Scott who taught me ControlAdapters after he read my post about coComment with CommunityServer 2007. You know, ControlAdapters are not only good for tweaking CSS.

My original solution was a replacement for the WeblogPostCommentForm, i.e. for every blog theme you had to edit its post.aspx, register my new control and replace the original control.

ControlAdapters however give you the power to inject your code into any desired existing control. In a central file you specify which controls you want to customize, and that's it. No editing of any pages or controls is required.

So I took the chance and transformed my custom comment form into a ControlAdapter. In fact, it's as easy as writing a control. Here's the simplified code, just in case you're interested:

public class WeblogPostCommentFormAdapter : ControlAdapter
{
    protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
    {
        base.OnPreRender(e);

        WeblogPostCommentForm commentForm = base.Control as WeblogPostCommentForm;
        if (commentForm != null)
        {
            string coCommentScript = GetCoCommentScript(commentForm);
            if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(coCommentScript))
                CSControlUtility.Instance().RegisterStartupScript(base.Control, 
                    typeof (WeblogPostCommentForm), "cocomment", coCommentScript, false);
        }
    }

    private static string GetCoCommentScript(WeblogPostCommentForm commentForm)
    {
        // just boring stuff which creates the javascript code to make coComment happy
    }
}

Just drop the attached assembly to your ~/bin folder and add following line to the controlAdapters section in ~/App_Browsers/default.browser:

<adapter controlType="CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls.WeblogPostCommentForm"
    adapterType="ThomasFreudenberg.CS2007.WeblogPostCommentFormAdapter, ThomasFreudenberg.CS2007" />

That's all, without further editing of any files¹ coComment support is enabled for all blog themes automagically.

¹ unless of course if you're already using the assembly I published yesterday; in this case revert all changes done to your post.aspx'