iLabbook Development

The main approach to customizing Oqtane is to create or import custom modules. The easiest way to create a custom module is to use the custom module builder that is included by default in Oqtane. This will provide a basic framework for a working custom module.

But that working custom module is limited. The default module provides the ability for the user to create one or more items. Each item has a Name string. The created items can be edited or deleted by the user. The created items are listed in the module along with Edit and Delete buttons for each item. However, to extend this default module requires custom programming.

A very helpful beginning guide to the custom programming that can be used to modify the default custom module is provided by Michael Washington on his Blazor Help Website. He describes how to extend the module with additional fields by adding more database migrations and then modifying the code appropriately.

Based on this approach, there are a couple of additional possibilities for creating custom modules as well.

  • Template Creation - How to create a custom template that then can be used in the custom module dropdown to create modules with the given field structure

  • Module Modification - How to modify a custom external module that is generated to have the appropriate fields

Either of these approaches should work and the differences are minor. Probably in most cases the Module Modification is preferable since you will end up with an external module that can be copied and used by others. The Template Creation approach also creates an external module, but it requires some extra steps. These approaches work well for multiple fields being added for a given customization.

Creating Documentation

To create this documentation, someone can first compile this documentation on their local computer. Then they can use GIT to post the result to their own github repository using the followng commands.

  • git add .
  • git commit
  • git push

If someone has an IIS server to host this documentation, they can then pull the code from the github repo with the command 'git pull' under the directory where the documentation is hosted. After restarting the IIS server for that website, the new documentation should be displayed, perhaps after the cache for the browser has been cleared.