Database Design

Overview

Now that you understand the concept of modules and are getting ready to develop your own, this chapter guides you on how to begin development starting with the database layer. As in most application development, you want to build a database structure for your application. This chapter covers some basic database development and how to expose your data to a DotNetNuke module.

Chapter 7 introduced the concept of the Provider Model and how DotNetNuke uses it to abstract the business layer logic from the physical database. In this chapter, you develop your modules by modeling the three-tier architecture of DotNetNuke.

The sections on creating tables and stored procedures review some basic SQL Server development concepts. From there, you learn how to expose the stored procedures through a custom Data Provider that you will develop for your module. Extending on the DotNetNuke architecture, you develop an abstraction layer for the module to provide a separation from the physical database for your module.

Developing with SQL Server is beyond the scope of this book, but this chapter covers how you expose your database's structure to DotNetNuke. It covers table structure and stored procedures as a reference on how the structure relates to your module development.

Note 

Again, the Events module is used in the example for this chapter and the next two chapters on module development. The Events module project is located within the DotNetNuke.DesktopModules solution in the Solutions directory contained off of the root of the DotNetNuke distribution package.