The Food & Drink Federation

www.fdf.org.uk

6 Catherine Street
London WC2B 5JJ

Summary:

The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) represents the UK's food and drink manufacturing industry. PSE were asked by FDF to develop a members only area within their existing website. The extranet contains a secure document archive and various committee pages. Editing of page and database content is provided through our PageLocker system.

The brief

"Members only extranet for the Food and Drink Federation"

FDF were already operating a website and were looking for the following enhancements:

• A password-protected area supporting different access rights for different users
• User registration pages with various automated emails at different stages of the registration process
• A content management facility to allow web content to be updated by authorised users using simple web forms
• An email facility to allow bulk emails to be sent to one or more groups of users registered on the system
• Data-driven content fed from a new SQL-server database
• Easy-to-use web forms for maintaining the database content

How we answered it

Dynamic content
Automated dynamic content such as table search results was achieved using Active Server Pages to render the HTML using information drawn from the SQL-server database through ADO. Stored procedures and COM technology were used wherever possible to maximise performance.

Security
Because of the flexibility required in the user-level security system, we chose to develop a bespoke session management and security system. As we were hosting on NT for the Active Server Pages, we opted for a custom multi-tier COM component developed with Visual Basic. The component was developed to allow use with a SQL-Server or Access database to enable reuse in other projects where SQL server is not available. This was achieved by using separate data tiers for each database. The component was optimised for each database, for example by using stored procedures in the SQL-server version.

Encrypted session IDs are held in cookies and checked by the COM component whenever a secure page is accessed. Using server-side includes, a standard HTML page can be secured by adding just a few lines of script.

Whenever a page is requested, the user's access rights are checked against the requirements for the page and the user is redirected to a logon page if necessary. After logging on, the user is taken to the page they originally requested.

The component also handles page hit and session logging if selected in the user profile.

Content Management System
We developed a template based content management system to enable users to update the content of web pages.

We wanted to avoid drawing page content from the database when it is changed infrequently because this would have an impact on the performance of the website. The solution we developed stores the content in the database but physically rewrites the HTML page the first time it is requested after an update becomes due. This means that updated content is only ever read once from the database and also allows multiple scheduled updates to be entered into the system, with users seeing the scheduled updates when they click on a link to the page. The performance is such that the user is unaware that the page has been recreated.

The web forms for updating content are fully tailorable to allow multiple editable regions with dropdowns, checkboxes, text areas and comments for each region.

The technology we used

The following development languages and technologies were used in the development of this solution:

• Visual Basic (VB)/li>
• ADO
• CDONTS
• SQL-Server
• SQL Server stored procedures
• Active Server Pages (ASP)
• Visual Interdev
• HTML
• VBScript
• JavaScript