how to develop server side application(like live chat) in sdl tridion?

Question

I would like to develop a live chat application, to allow Web users to chat with customer service or with each other.

What are my options?

• I have created some ascx user controls to provide the functionality.
• How do I render this to my page?
• In a Page template building block (TBB), I wrote code for component presentation/rendering.

I want to know if I need to create a user control as a component on page and if so, how to do so.

For component rendering I used:

<!-- TemplateBeginRepeat name="Components" -->
  <!-- TemplateBeginIf cond="ComponentTemplate == 'HomePageCT'" -->
    @@RenderComponentPresentation()@@
  <!-- TemplateEndIf -->   
<!-- TemplateEndRepeat -->

Answer 1

My usual method to get anything to work with Tridion is to first develop it without Tridion.

Start by getting your app to run in IIS or Tomcat or whatever you use for your delivery platform.

Once you're happy with that, start moving it into Templates. In your specific case, I guess this functionality is something that may be added to pages by editors, so a Component Template would make sense. Make sure the output of your template contains all the code you would potentially need (including any controls, javascript references, etc) and everything in your output that may require configuration should be in the component associated with this template.

Remember, you can publish anything from Tridion, you should focus on getting it to work, then adapt your Tridion templates.

Reading your question again, it seems you're stuck on the very basics of Tridion... Yes, you can use RenderComponentPresentation, just make sure you component template creates the required code you need on the delivery side.

Answer 2

Although you can build pretty much anything that goes on in a web site with Tridion, you have to wonder for every requirement what the added benefits are of building it in Tridion and weigh those against the additional cost of building it in Tridion.

Nuno already suggests to first build this functionality outside of Tridion and then porting it over, which is indeed a good approach. But even with that approach I seriously doubt how much benefit you'll get from having this in Tridion.

Tridion is a Content Management System and I doubt there is a lot content to be managed for this application. And if there isn't content to be managed, I'd simply leave the ASCX control in the ASP.NET web application and simply include it with <asp:chatcontrol>(assuming that you built this custom tag) in your DWT.