Ok, so like almost everyone else out there, I was hoping for page aliases to be generated with hyphens, so I did a little digging.

The function which generates the tabpath is in Globals.vb, named GenerateTabPath. It calls through to HtmlUtils.StripNonWord, which removes non-word characters and removes them (although the function has the option of replacing with a space).

StripNonWord uses a regular expression "\W*" (match any non-word character, ie anything that is not [a-zA-Z_0-9]), which as you can see will happily rip out the -s.

So I look at this function thinking 'what do we really want in the tab path?'.

Maybe we should start with some examples:

'Health & Safety' would be great as 'Health-Safety'

'What's going on?' might be nice as 'Whats-going-on'

What does that mean, how can we get this in this StripNonWord function?

1. Strip out everything that is [^\w\-\s], replace with nothing. This would remove anything that is not "a-zA-Z_0-9(hyphen)(space)" (and give us 'Health  Safety' and 'Whats going on')

2. Replace runs of spaces (\s*) with a hyphen (leaving us 'Health-Safety' and 'Whats-going-on')

3. Profit.

So that would make the line of code:

[code]

                 Return System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(HTML, "\W*", RepString)

[/code]

into:

[code]

                Dim Stripped As String

           
               
                Stripped = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(HTML, "[^\w\-\s]", "")

                Stripped = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(Stripped, "\s+", "-")

                Return Stripped

[/code]

I've done a search over all the DNN source code (4.4.1) and found just two places that this function is called from. One is in the GenerateTabPath function, the other is in the GenerateTabPath function also.

Well, I'm not sure if this will work, or if it's exactly what everyone has been after, or whether we can petition to get it in the proper DNN tabpath code if it is something worth doing, just thought I'd throw it out there for anyone interested. I haven't done binaries for download or anything, I'll leave that to someone else who has more time :)

Hope that helps, and is useful to someone.

Max

I can test it.  I can also host it for a time if it works.  Please send me a private message.

--Bruce

Hey Max,

Nice work! I'm running 4.5.1 here and no problems with the mod. Now I dont have to maually edit my tabs table to get hyphens but still for lowercase. I was looking into your code and wanted to mention something. I'm not an expert in cs or regex but here goes. To get the lowercase, you could process the stripped path before adding the hyphens by using "\L" somehow. Thats regex for lowercase right? I've made some mods to your code but they are not working. My 2 cents.

Yes, you are right, probably a bug in DNN, good job !!

DV

I am not happy to report that there are some general exceptions being generated using this module. 2 to be exact. I performed a file and database backup before installing this mod. I noticed after installing this mod with the little lowercase tweak in the code that when you recycle the application the following general exceptions occur. After restoring the filesystem and database the errors are not generated.

AssemblyVersion: -1
PortalID: -1
PortalName:
UserID: -1
UserName:
ActiveTabID: -1
ActiveTabName:
RawURL:
AbsoluteURL:
AbsoluteURLReferrer:
UserAgent:
DefaultDataProvider:
ExceptionGUID:
InnerException: Could not load type ''.
FileName:
FileLineNumber: -1
FileColumnNumber: -1
Method:
StackTrace:
Message: System.Web.HttpException: Could not load type ''. ---> System.ArgumentException: String cannot have zero length.at System.Reflection.Assembly.GetType(String name, Boolean throwOnError, Boolean ignoreCase)at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetType(String typeName, Boolean throwOnError, Boolean ignoreCase)--- End of inner exception stack trace ---at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetType(String typeName, Boolean throwOnError, Boolean ignoreCase)at DotNetNuke.Framework.Reflection.CreateType(String TypeName, String CacheKey, Boolean UseCache, Boolean IgnoreErrors)
Source:
Server Name: SERVER02

AssemblyVersion: -1
PortalID: -1
PortalName:
UserID: -1
UserName:
ActiveTabID: -1
ActiveTabName:
RawURL:
AbsoluteURL:
AbsoluteURLReferrer:
UserAgent:
DefaultDataProvider:
ExceptionGUID:
InnerException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: type
FileName:
FileLineNumber: -1
FileColumnNumber: -1
Method:
StackTrace:
Message: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: typeat System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic)at DotNetNuke.Framework.Reflection.CreateObject(String TypeName, String CacheKey)at DotNetNuke.Services.Search.ModuleIndexer.GetModuleList(Int32 PortalID)
Source:
Server Name: SERVER02