Happy Halloween! 'Tis the season, so let's perform some magic and reanimate an old friend, the Reports Module! Also, get the latest DNN news. 

Introductions

As always, we can't do this without help from our great sponsors. We introduce the founders of the user group and then talk about our sponsors. J&S Tech Designs provides the Gotomeeting when we meet virtually as we did this time. And Managed.com, formerly PowerDNN.com (and a few other sites merged into one now), provides this website for us, plus buys the food and drink when we meet live and in-person.

News

Jim Nagy reports the news from DNN Corporate as well as the state of the DNN User Group.

Reports Module Magic

Don Gingold of Sprocket Websites tells about a client project they just did. The client wanted a request form, but instead of the usual form-to-email method, they wanted the data kept on the server and only an email notice. It had to do with privacy and security.  

No problem! We already were using NextGen's Form Master on the site, and it can save the data to a data table, then send an email custom-made by us with a link to a page to get the results.  That page would be protected via DNN roles so only people with permission to see the list of requests can get to the page. 

So what's the list displayed with? Reports Module to the rescue as always. It's a great module to do a simple SQL request for data and then format it using a supplied template. The client loved it. Then they realized that the list of requests might get long. Can we make a request disappear after they processed it? But not deleted, so they can look at all requests made?

After a little dissection, some lab experiments, and a few other halloween type references, we combined a little-known aspect of Reports Module and some creative templating, and we had our (well, their) solution. Take a look.

(Oh, BTW, we start with a long aside and shout-out to our friends at Easy DNN Solutions who make EasyDNN News and Rotator, for the cool Emergency Broadcasting System we created using the Rotator and News modules. Enjoy)

Closing remarks

We thank folks and talk about next month.

Please leave comments at this article so we know this was of value to you. If you have a better solution using other well-known DNN modules, we'd love to hear it. Maybe you can demonstrate at an upcoming meeting!! Thanks!