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I saw a tweet come across the other day from @adamkranitz:

adamkranitz: I would kill for "Duplicate This Post" button in Telligent CommunityServer blog software.

Hmm… I have a list…  I mean, I think I can figure that out…

So I asked @adamkranitz for some details, pulled down the Community Server 2008.5 SDK and got to work.

I’m not a developer and you should probably consider that if you take any code off my blog but here is how I chose to solve the “Duplicate This Post” button need.

First, I’m going to do this directly in the UI of the control panel with some server-side code.  I need a “Duplicate” button on the post list page of my site.  The URL is http://localhost/CS2008.5SP1/controlpanel/blogs/postlist.aspx.  In the SDK, I looked at the contents of \source\CommunityServer.Web\ControlPanel\Blogs and found PostList.aspx and PostListControl.ascx.  I made a backup of PostListControl.ascx (an EXTREMELY important step for me…) and took a look.

So – first, I’ve got to add the button.  I noticed that there was a alternating item template in the page so I’ve got to add my button in both sections:

<cp:ResourceButton CommandArgument='<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "PostID")%>' CommandName="Duplicate" OnCommand="Duplicate_Click" Runat="server" ID="DuplicateButton" Text="Duplicate" />

The CommandArgument was already there in the Delete button above where I wanted my Duplicate button so I got lucky.

The hard part of this whole thing was figuring out what attributes needed to be set to get the post to show up.  There’s a copy() method on a Post entity but I decided to set each value individually.  What I ended up with was the following:

<script runat="server">
    protected void Duplicate_Click(object sender, CommandEventArgs e)
    {
        int PostID;       
        if (int.TryParse(e.CommandArgument.ToString(), out PostID))
            DuplicatePost(PostID);
        else
            return;
    }
    private void DuplicatePost(int PostID)
    {
        WeblogPost orig = WeblogPosts.GetPost(PostID, true, false, true);
        //WeblogPost newpost = (WeblogPost)orig.Copy();

        WeblogPost newpost = new WeblogPost();
        newpost.IsApproved = false;
        newpost.Body = orig.Body;
        newpost.Subject = "Copy of " + orig.Subject;
        newpost.Categories = orig.Categories;
        newpost.PostDate = DateTime.Now;
        newpost.ThreadDate = DateTime.Now;
        newpost.UserTime = DateTime.Now;

        newpost.PostType = orig.PostType;
        //newpost.ApplicationType = orig.ApplicationType;
        newpost.BlogPostType = orig.BlogPostType;
        newpost.Name = "Copy of " + orig.Name;
        //newpost.ExtendedAttributesKeys = orig.ExtendedAttributesKeys;
        newpost.AuthorID = orig.AuthorID;
        newpost.Section = orig.Section;
        newpost.SectionID = orig.SectionID;

        WeblogPosts.Add(newpost, orig.User);
    }
</script>

By the way – to get this working, I had to open up SQL and see what was being stored in the CS_Posts table – I tweaked values in the table to get the posts showing up on the page and then fixed the code in my page to do what I knew needed to be done…

A better way to do this would probably have been through REST but that’s documented – where’s the fun in that?!?!

Ok, the file can be downloaded here if you want the whole control.