asp.net smtp email configuration for localhost testing

I had a opportunity to work on a project where the client wanted to send email to his clients once the data is inserted in the database.
Once I started working on that portion of the code, the client still didn't had the smtp settings he'll use for his website online, so I needed to test my code in local envionment and make sure that everything works fine.
First thing I did was to add a system.net node in the web.config file and configure that accordingly to the localhost envionment:

<system.net>
<mailsettings>
<smtp from="arnaudovangel@yahoo.com" deliverymethod="SpecifiedPickupDirectory">
<specifiedpickupdirectory pickupdirectorylocation="C:\TempWebService\">
<network host="localhost">
</network></specifiedpickupdirectory></smtp>
</mailsettings>
</system.net>

Once I had that done, I created a method to send the email, with a parameter for the outgoing email address. The method was looking something like this:

public void sendEmail(string emailAddress)
{
MailMessage msg = new MailMessage("test@test.com", emailAddress, "test", "test body");
SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient();
client.UseDefaultCredentials = true;
client.Send(msg);
}

Once that method was executed, a new mail messsage was created in the folder I specified, in this case: C:\TempWebService.
Once you apply the real smtp settings, the message will be delivered to the selected email.

Thanks for reading, Angel

Hide / Show Datalist item in datalist asp.net c#

Hello everyone -
Its time again for a new blog post.
This time it will be related to asp.net datalist and datalistitems.
I was asked to hide show datalistitems in a datalist control depending from some parameters in the code.
Normally I did a loop through all the datalistitems in the datalist and if something is as it should be, enable that listitem.

foreach (DataListItem item in this.dlShopping.Items)
{
string namee = this.dlShopping.DataKeys[item.ItemIndex].ToString();
item.Visible = false;
if (namee.Equals("UPS GROUND") || namee.Equals("UPS 2 DAY AIR"))
{
item.Visible = true;
}
}

The code was working fine, but the end result was that all the datalist items were displayed, without filtering the one which were suppose to show up.

The solution to really filter the results was to add one more line in the code about the layout of the datalist.

dlShopping.RepeatLayout = RepeatLayout.Flow;

This helps the items to be displayed in random structure without using a table.
So, next time you want to do something like I did today, that line of code will solve your problems.
Thanks for reading.

How to list items in categories and subcategories in treeview

Hello everyone -
Today I will explain how I solved problem I had with listing multiple subcategories in a treeview control on asp.net page.
I had problem where I was suppose to display files listed in categories which were populated by the user and then the files under each category were uploaded on the server from a user.
The files were all in one folder per company, and there was a table in the database where I was saving the info about which files are going where, under which name and which user.
So, I started to get my hands dirty.
First, I wanted to get all the categories which were created and there was a record for them in the database.
I did a simple query for doing that, and then I fetch the data from the table to a node in the treeview:

string getCategories = "SELECT Category FROM Categories";
SqlCommand commCat = new SqlCommand(getCategories, conn);
comm.CommandTimeout = 0;
comm.CommandType = CommandType.Text;
SqlDataReader rdrCat = commCat.ExecuteReader();
while (rdrCat.Read())
{
if (rdrCat.HasRows)
{
catNode = new TreeNode();
catNode.Text = rdrCat["Category"].ToString();
catNode.Value = rdrCat["Category"].ToString();
tvDocuments.Nodes.Add(catNode);
}
}


Once I had all the categories created in the treeview I went to get all the files for each category.
I created stored procedure which gets all the files and their categories from the info stored in the database.
Once I had all the info about the files and their respected categories I started looping through the nodes in the treeview and if the node had the same name as the category for the file, add the file to that category.
The loop was going like this:

foreach (DataRow dt in tblTreeView.Rows)
{
foreach (TreeNode node in tvDocuments.Nodes)
{
if (node.Text.Equals(dt[0].ToString()))
{
fileNode = new TreeNode();
fileNode.Text = dt[1].ToString();
fileNode.NavigateUrl = "../downloading.aspx?file=" + dt[1].ToString() + "&user=" + userID;
node.ChildNodes.Add(fileNode);
}
}
}


Since the file nodes were also hyperlink for downloading the documents I set the navigate url to the appropriate page for downloading along with the filename and the user id.

Thanks for reading and comments always appreciated.