Dave Burke - CS Nuglet: Determining first forum thread post for custom UI display

CS Nuglet: Determining first forum thread post for custom UI display

I needed to display a graphic under the user avatar on the first forum thread post today and found it to be an interesting little task. Essentially I took an approach similar to highlighting an author's comment in CS2008.5, which I always thought was pretty slick. You'll find that on …/hawaii/post.aspx. Look for IsAuthor().

For our purposes of displaying a graphic in the first forum thread post under the user avatar, we add a Conditional Content control with a custom IsFirstPost() method.

<CSControl:ConditionalContent ID="ConditionalContent1" runat="server">
    <ContentConditions>
        <CSControl:CustomCondition ID="CustomCondition1"
            runat="server" CustomResult='<%# IsFirstPost(Eval("Subject")) %>' />
    </ContentConditions>
    <TrueContentTemplate>
        My cool graphic...
    </TrueContentTemplate>
    <FalseContentTemplate />
</CSControl:ConditionalContent>

Our IsFirstPost() method checks if the subject begins with "Re:" to indicate it's a reply. I've scoured the ForumPost object for a distinct property to use instead, but didn't find one I liked. Or else I was approaching it wrong. Regardless, the subject "Re:" test works just fine.

    bool IsFirstPost(object subject)
    {
        bool isFirstPost = true;
        if (subject.ToString().Substring(0,3) == "Re:")
            isFirstPost = false;
        return (isFirstPost);
    }

</script>

Now my cool graphic appears under the user avatar of the first forum thread post only.