The XORIT control Iteration for IBO .NET (XII abbreviated) is congruent with the web parts methodology of web development. Controls are placed on a page, such as contact information, billing information, event registration, book orders, basket summary and credit card information. When the user clicks the button to process the selection, the XII is called, and based upon the controls that are on the page, processes the credit card and saves the information in iMIS using iBO .NET. XII comes with an executive level design tool, XII Designer. The way XII knows the difference between a contact info control and an event registration control is the ID of the control. The XII designer generates basic C# ASP .NET web pages, with the controls placed with their correct ID's and procedural calls to the XII. Any iMIS user such as the membership director, can easily use this XII Designer, it requires no technical skills. The pages can be handed off to a .NET programmer with no skills or knowledge of iMIS to finish the esthetics of the web pages. XII is a concept that is the happy median between having a rigid application, with custom controls, such as the iMIS Public View, where there are lots of setup pages, but little can be customized on the actual pages. In order for the admin pages of the iMIS Public View to handle every possible client configuration, it would require an infinite number of options to be set. XII uses only basic .NET controls. Instead of creating a screen designer, it is intended that the free Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition be used to set the final layout of the pages. XII is not a tool for selecting esthetics. It is a tool which allows esthetics to be easily applied. The XII concept does require a web programmer to make HTML edits and possibly .NET edits to improve the esthetics, but so does the iMIS Public View. ASP .NET 3.5 AJAX can easily be applied. .NET 3.5 AJAX controls do not replace simple .NET controls, they are added to pages to improve the esthetics of the pages, and are designed to work with simple .NET controls. There are too many .NET 3.5 AJAX controls to put into the XII Designer. And why should they when they can be easily added using the free Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition? This also allows for other rapid application development tools, such as TELERIK to be used to improve esthetics. Installation is simple. XII is a dll that is placed in your .NET web applications bin folder. A few app settings are added to the web.config file. The XII Designer is copied to any iMIS executive's workstation for designing the pages. XII handles all the iBO .NET coding! It also maintains the session state between pages, saving all information on the XII controls in one session variable in XML format. It also handles sending the confirmation emails. If changes are required, the whole process of applying the esthetics does not have to be redone. The XII works off the ID of the .NET control, so the XII Designer can regenerate the basic ASP .NET pages, and the web developer can copy and paste the control to be added to the finished pages. Then esthetics need only be applied to the new control that is added. If you don't have e-Series or the iMIS Public Views, there is a Lite version! It does not save the transactions into iMIS, as it cannot use iBO, if you don't have the license fees paid for that. What it does is save all the information in the audit table, and one of the iMIS administrators receives a carbon copy of the confirmation email. There is a utility to review the audit, where confidential information such as encrypted credit card numbers can be reveiwed. You will have to key in the transactions into iMIS, but this has the highest return on investment for small associations who cannot affort the e-Series or iMIS Public View license fees due to low transaction volume. Can be used in iMIS 15 Public View iMIS 15.1 e-CM ASP .NET applications ColdFusion 8 (consuming ASP .NET pages) Linux/php – and any other platform with the use of HTML IFRAME’s

For a demonstration, watch the flash videos. or Try one of the live Demos

XORIT Survey – X Survey is a product that allows for simple or complex surveys to be created by using the free Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express Edition. In design mode it is a WYSIWYG editor for creating web pages. A non-technical person can easily create the survey, very similar to using a word processor. There are two blocks of code to be copied into the “code behind” – but it is just simple copy and paste and the survey is ready to go. And the code blocks can easily be added to the Visual Web Developer’s Toolbar. The product can be installed in minutes.

The process to create the survey is simple. Using the free Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express Edition in design mode, tables can be drawn to layout the page(s), text can be entered, fields dragged and dropped onto the tables. Associated with every data entry field are a set of properties. Most of these properties are for esthetics. Such as font color, size, border color, border width, etc. The X Survey also needs the ID property to be filled out. By default, Visual Web Developer will just append a number to the end of the data field type, such as “TextBox1”. This should be changed, as X Survey uses the ID as the column heading for the data entered. The page name is also important, as this will be used as the survey’s name when stored in the database.

ASP required field validate controls can be dragged and dropped onto the form for required fields. No coding is required, click on the controls “smart tag” and a small essential properties window opens up allowing the non-technical person to set which field is required.

The final step is to copy two blocks of code into the “code behind”. The first is in the Page_Load, and is optional. It is only required if the participant must be logged in. If so, the options are to put this page in the iMIS public view, or to make sure that there is an ASP Session variable called ID set to the member’s ID, or a domain cookie called ID set to the member’s ID. The second code block is copy and pasted into the submit buttons Click event. This is to save the data into either the XORIT_Survey table.

The installation is simple. X Survey is a dll that is placed in the bin folder of a .NET application – XORITSurvey.dll The web.config file is edited for settings used by the XSurvey.dll

What makes this whole process simple, is that when the participant goes through the survey, the XORITSurvey.dll iterates through all the controls on the page, collects the ID’s and data, and then saves it. This eliminates the hassle of having a database designer create a table and column for every entry field. This method is way too restrictive. Until the survey goes live, it is highly prone to changes in questions. The solution should not slow the design of the survey down waiting for a developer to become available, and the cost of having a developer be part of the solution.

Instead of a separate table for every survey, all of the column names are stored in one field, all of the data is stored in comma delimited field, and again all of the data is stored in XML format in another field and finally stored in HTML format in yet another field. Most statistical analysis programs use a comma delimited import format. So to get the data into the statistical program, a very simple Crystal report is also provide to create the comma delimited export, with the column names in the header row. If only a subset of the questions needs to be analyzed, then the comma delimited file can be opened in Microsoft Excel, and the unwanted columns can be deleted.

The data entry fields that can be added to the web page are the ASP standard controls of: TextBox, DropDownList, ListBox, CheckBox, CheckBoxList, RadioButton, RadioButtonList and the HTML controls Input (of type Text, Checkbox & Radio) and Textarea. The only restriction of the X Survey product, is that it only runs in an ASP .NET web site. But this creates big advantage, as the web page can also use the latest version of .NET and the AJAX Control Toolkit. For instance for an anonymous survey, the AJAX Control Toolkit NoBot could be added to prevent somebody from skewing the survey by submitting multiple surveys. The X Survey does not have this functionality built in, because there is low return on investment. Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit is free and has the easy to use NoBot control. You can go to the Microsoft website and watch a flash instructional video and add it.

Though the X Survey needs to reside in an ASP .NET web site, it can be part of any other type of web site, such as ColdFusion or linux by the use of HTML IFRAME’s.

To conclude, the X Survey is about simplifying the survey creation process and allowing the most flexibility as well. It allows for new technology to be applied when it becomes available. The bulk of the survey – drawing it out, can be done by a non-technical person already employed by the association. Optionally, the user interface can be improved by sending the web page to a .NET developer, who does not need to know anything about iMIS, the survey or how the XORITSurvey.dll works. AJAX controls can be added to enhance the user experience. The export to the statistical software is simply running a Crystal Report.