Greetings from Snowy Charlotte...
I am trying to create a dynamic web site that will be "skinned" based
upon an authenticated user's information. This skinning could be
extensive (entire change to the UI appearance) or more minimal with a
measure of personalization such as the adding of links to a
navigational menu option.
I've done something similar to this in the past by putting all the
appropriate data into a database table, but that option will not be
available in this situation. I'm hoping to be able to do this with
XML/XSLT.
My vision was to create a CSS on the fly based upon information in one
XML file such as:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<styles>
<style>
<name>Error</name>
<font>Times</font>
<color>Red</color>
<size>24pt</size>
</style>
<style>
<name>1</name>
<font>Arial</font>
<color>Blue</color>
<size>18pt</size>
</style>
<style>
<name>2</name>
<font>Tahoma</font>
<color>Green</color>
<size>14pt</size>
</style>
</styles>
The idea here being to pass to the walk the xml tree based upon the
<name> that I will know once the user has logged in and has been
authenticated.
Once that phase is complete, I need to get the information specific
for the UI changes, such as logos and the aforementioned links idea. I
have not created this xml document yet, and would appreciate any
suggestions the world can offer.
In addition to applying these UI changes, I will need to be able to
write back to the xml document to add or delete links, etc.
After spending a couple of days on this, by brain is about to explode.
I'm hoping someone out there has some words of sage advice for me, or
can point me to a couple of resources to help me get this going.
The frightening thing is that I've seen this done using CORBA and pure
XML/XSLT, but I need to be able to do this using ASP.NET (VB.NET code
behind) as there is going to be much, much more going on that using
XSLT for creation of the page layout is not feasible.
Thanks in advance for your help, and I'll look forward to the
(hopefully many) reponses.
Take care,
Ric
