ASP-DHTML MDI Framework for Site Administration

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Introduction

Almost every site I build has some sort of administration site built onto it and I wanted something to make the task of using these much easier by improving the interface. It was also required to be:

1. Quick to reuse
2. ASP centered and
3. Easy to add to existing sites.

After much experimenting, what I came up with was an ASP MDI framework which has been tested on Mozilla and IE.

How Did You Do That?

Each 'Window' is a DIV element that contains an IFRAME with the content. Also added in, is some stock JavaScript DHTML (CBE DHTML library) to enable user positioning of the elements and resizing. The window contents are web pages from your site or from another server.

All that is needed to create a window is a simple function call:

Sub AddDivWin ( id, x, y ,width, height, title, url) 

    ...

    'Codeproject.com Demo
    '---------------------
    'Main Window
    AddDivWin "MW1",30,50,450,230, "Main Page " & Now(), "myadmin.html"
    AddDivWin "MWTodo2",540,50,189,220, "To Do ", "todo.htm"
    AddDivWin "MWpad",30,320,344,270, "NotePad ", "notepad.htm"
    AddDivWin "MWnews",420,320,383,270, "News ", _ 
            "http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm"

The id should be unique and prefixed with MW if you want a moveable and resizable window. As the element creation is under ASP control, it is possible to do more advanced features. The above example pulls up a News site - this could be adapted to only show this window if certain keywords are present on the page.

Graphics were created with MS Photopaint with a slight XP look and feel - I hope!

Last words

This is very much a starting point. After all, admin pages are very site specific. I hope this code helps you out in some way. I think it is a step towards a digital dashboard and I plan to improve it. Would be interested in your uses for it. Suggestions welcome!

Credits

Thanks to www.cross-browser.com for their excellent DHTML library.

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