DNN PageBlaster Saved Rules

I just upgraded from the free (.net) PageBlaster to the DNN version.

• I discovered that the config files are different and merged my rules into the new one.
• I discoveregd that the caches are in different places and deleted the old place.
• I created a page just for PageBlaster and installed the module.
• I had dread Seablick Consulting's review of the module and realized that it came with several rules for xhtml compliance. Having just run into a couple of DNN module coded by people still thinking in the last century, I thought that PB would be an easy way to convert UPPER to lower and add ending slashes in the right spots.
• From the module I can't see the saved rules and move them from the saved to the portal rules. WHAT AM I MISSING?
• PB is working with my old rules, so it is running just fine.
• I do wonder whither "portal rules" are for a single portal or the whole site?  I have several parent portals and will want most rules to cover the whole site. Do I need to put theses in the config file to work?

Regards,

/DaveS

Hi Dave,

Thanks for purchasing.

The XHTML rules are in a file called PageBlaster.SavedRules.Xhtml.config located at /DesktopModules/Snapsis/PageBlaster/Config/SavedRules

I took those rules out of the default saved rules file because the UI slows down when there are a lot of rules to load and most people don't need them.

You can look in that file to find rules that do what you want.  The one to do lowercase on html tagslooks like this:

SearchFor:

ReplaceWith: [RE:toLower()]

And this one does lowercase on attributes:

SearchFor:  (?=[^>])\s[A-Z-]+=

ReplaceWith: [RE:toLower()]

And this one fixes elements that are not closed:

SearchFor: <(img|meta|link|input|br|hr)\s*([^>]*)([^/])>()?

ReplaceWith: <$1 $2$3 />

 I was afraid of that. They didn't all come out in the post.

You can look in that file to get them, and keep in mind that you don't need the CDATA wrapper when you are using the PB config interface.  The UI will add that itself.

I had already found the file but assumed that it was part of the kit.  I have set the cache times in the config file for 5 & 10 minutes, and added about 8 rules. The rules I transfered from my DotNet-PageBlaster appear to be working. The new rules don't

What is the easiest way to troublshoot PageBlaster rules? When I am working on content on my localhost I shut PB down, but now I want it working but re-processing the pages evey time a rule or the page content changes.

Also are the portal rule just for one portal and I would need to migrate them to the config file to get them to work for the parent portals as well?

Calling it a day now,

/DaveS

I think that I have it working now.

BTW where are the rules so that I can migrate them to my production site when I want to?

/DaveS

The “quote attr” rule messes up items that are quoted with single quotes a=’b’  I happen to have a couple places in a ListX module that has both single and double quotes. Double for ListX code and singles for HTML. It doesn’t work the other way around.  I think there is some nasty ListX escaping that I might be able to use.  I don’t even know is single quotes are legal in xhtml, put W3C didn’t complain about them.

One of the “remove type”, “style type” and “script type” rules break the Drop-down Actions for the container and I had to comment out PB from the web.config to and remove these rules continue.

I would have though one of the lower rules would have caught this  from Blogs   "td colSpan="2"..." or

"a Class='Forum_BreadCrumb' ...." from Forum.

Wow the blogs & forum modules are really interesting HTML code!

I assume that I make a rule to change the doctypes on a per page basis. You might want to provide one if you are going to supply these rules as part of PageBlaster. Clearly Blogs and Forum will be ‘Quirks Mode’ for some time to come.

I have gotten most of MY pages xhtml compliant. Exceptions are Blogs, Forums, a couple DNN modules that have poorly formed script lines. I need to go into DNN and fix the alignment error when you don’t display the container. All in all not too bad for a days work.

Regards,
DaveS

Thanks for the Feedback Dave. It sounds like you have taken this farther than I have.  I created all those rules and spent a lot of time on them so that it would work cleanly on most pages, but as you have found there is always something coded a little different than the rules expect.

I'm pretty sure I have a rule in there to change DocType.

I ended up just making my home page XHTML Strict so that first time vistors to my site would at least have the best experience I could make there. 

There is another thread in these forums where we were colaborating a bit on this subject here:

http://www.snapsis.com/Support/tabid/601/view/topic/forumid/9/postid/4706/Default.aspx

I may merge this thread with that one as we move forward.

Another little trick I use in my Snapsis.PageBlaster.config file is add an exclude pattern="xxx" to exclude from replacements. Then if I ever have a rule that is keeping the page from working I just add the XXX to the querystring so I can pull it back out.

I just read through ths again and I see a couple things I didn't answer. Yes, Single or Double quotes are valid for attributes as long as they are correctly paired.

One thing you might consider for the problems in the ListX code is to put comment and/or CDATA blocks around it, just like you do with inline Javascript.

There was also one rule or set that seemd to effect the second row of the silver hover menu from showing up. But with all of the enabling - disabling of PB etc. I forgot to write it down.  I thought it was the script ones but it isn't and they do work with the SolPart  Actions. Since I like them better than the dropdown and PB now fixes their crappy HTML I just tweaked by container pak to use them.

Moving forward slowly but steadily --- DaveS

Being an old (very old) Unix regex coder I have some questions about the rules:

Is this regex 8 with extensions as it appears?

As I look at the "lower attr" rule  (?=[^>])\s[A-Z-]+=  I am having a little trouble figuring it out

You are looking for BOL or > folled by a space and one or more UPPER case letters followed by and = sign

and you are going to lowercase just the uppercase.

If I have decifered this correctly I don't undersand the > or the BOL or why you aren't lowwering casing the entire word.

Before I hack into this I thought I should understand what you are trying to do.

/Dave   Hope this renders ok ==}