HTMLEditor Provider – How to write a custom provider for ASP.NET 2.0

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/HTMLEditor.asp

Introduction

While working on a recent ASP.NET project, we came across an interesting problem. In several areas of the application, we wanted to allow the end user to enter formatted HTML text. There are several excellent web based HTML Editor components available on the web, some open source, some commercial. How do we decide which one to use, and if we sell the application to clients, how do we maintain proper licensing? The answer we came up with was to supply the HTML Editor via the provider model. This would allow us to ship the application with a basic HTML Editor with a licensing scheme we are comfortable with, and still allow the client (who may have already purchased a commercial editor) to implement an editor of their choice with minimal effort and cost.

Armed with a plan, I fired up Google and started to search for info on creating an HTML editor provider. The results were disappointing. I found hundreds of articles on customizing Microsoft's built-in providers (Role, Membership, etc.) but little to nothing about creating your own, unique provider. Eventually, I came across Microsoft's Provider Toolkit which offered some provider template files along with white papers and code samples. The problem is that they don't take you all the way to the end. The instructions that come with the templates only describe how to perform the search and replace functions to customize the templates, but not how to add your own parameters, or worse - how to implement it once you've created the classes! It was all I had however, so I sat down with the code and started to plug away at it. This article is the result of those efforts. While I'm not sure that I'll be able to answer every question you may have about creating a custom provider, at least maybe you'll have a jumping off point to get you started.

What I will not do in this article is attempt to explain what the provider model is or how it might fit into your particular needs and schemes. If you are unfamiliar with providers, I strongly urge you to do some research on this topic before proceeding with this article. The articles and white papers that are on the Provider Toolkit's page are an excellent start.

 

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/HTMLEditor.asp