As you know, Sueetie is now running the latest Gallery Server Pro bits, so I'm taking the opportunity to spend more quality time with GSP than I normally do. It dawned on me that I never described the very cool capability of displaying photos and other media from anywhere on the Sueetie Online Community. We've been doing it for a while in the Sueetie Media List View Control showing recent photos on my home page, for instance, but I recently made some changes to make displaying media content anywhere in a Sueetie Community even easier.
What's exciting to me is now that we can take for granted the display of media content anywhere in Sueetie, consider the custom integration possibilities! But that's for another day. Below is a copy of the new Sueetie Feature Rich wiki document which describes the process with plenty of screenshots and behind the scenes geekiness.
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Viewing Media Content Outside of Gallery Server Pro
Gallery Server Pro stores and displays nearly all types of media available today, and with the Sueetie Framework you can display that media from anywhere in your Online Community. Sueetie does that by extending the Gallery Server Pro MediaObject with additional properties to form the SueetieMediaObject. With the additional information we then take advantage of Gallery Server Pro's built-in QueryString encryption and decryption functions to display media content directly on the page.
For our purposes we're going to focus on displaying image content and will discuss other media types elsewhere. Let's go straight to some screenshots which will do a better job of explaining the process of displaying Gallery Server Pro content from anywhere in a Sueetie Community.
Sueetie List View Controls
Sueetie List View Controls have been around for quite some time. This is one example of how Sueetie is able to directly display Gallery Server Pro content. You can see an example on the Sueetie.com homepage and on other Sueetie-based sites, like my personal homepage shown below.
Each image of the Most Recent Photos display uses Gallery Server Pro's built-in QueryString encryption/decryption functions.
Using Gallery Server Pro's QueryString functions
When media objects are added to Gallery Server Pro, a SueetieMediaObject is created containing additional Sueetie properties as well as three encrypted strings for the Thumbnail Image, the Optimized size (an intermediate size, by default 640x480), and the Original Image. These properties are stored in a SQL table sueetie_gs_mediaobject as shown below.
Now whenever we want to display those images we use Gallery Server Pro's getmediaobject.ashx Media Handler and include the appropriate query string in the format
http://dbvt.com/photos/gs/handler/getmediaobject.ashx?rIH68NGrRrBmnZ0dLI....
Using the SueetieMediaObject properties, you would create an image url doing something like this.
Displaying the Image in Gallery Server Pro
Finally, you may ask how might you display the image inside of Gallery Server Pro? That's easy, too. While the images in the List View Control don't happen to be linked directly to the image in GSP, each media object in GSP has it's own unique MOID, or Media Object ID. Pass this to your media gallery's default.aspx using the sample format
http://dbvt.com/photos/default.aspx?moid=2727
to display the image with all of the additional features of Gallery Server Pro.