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[Bug]: Edit theme attribute fails to update skin and container due to case sensitive search

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
csharp
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start with Dnn.AdminExperience/Dnn.PersonaBar.Extensions/Components/Themes/ThemesController.cs and read the tag-matching logic identified in the issue. Reproduce the failure with an ASCX tag whose attribute casing or order differs from the expected string, then determine how to handle those variations. Done means editing theme attributes updates the matching ASCX tag and the issue’s reproduction steps no longer fail.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Status: New
Is there an existing issue for this?
  • I have searched the existing issues
What happened?

Hi DNN Fam,

I tried Persona Bar → Themes → Edit Theme Attributes for the first time today and discovered that the feature is… very precise about markup formatting. 😊

What happened

The UI reports “saved successfully”, but the skin/container ASCX file doesn’t change because DNN doesn’t find the tag it intends to update.

Root cause

The matching logic uses a literal, case-sensitive string search and expects a very specific tag format (including attribute casing and ordering):

File: Dnn.AdminExperience/Dnn.PersonaBar.Extensions/Components/Themes/ThemesController.cs

var strTag = "<dnn:" + updateTheme.Token + " runat=\"server\" id=\"dnn" + updateTheme.Token + "\""; var intOpenTag = strSkin.IndexOf(strTag); if (intOpenTag != -1) { ... }

So markup like this (perfectly valid and commonly used in commercial skins):

<dnn:BREADCRUMB ID="dnnBreadcrumb" runat="server" ... />

…won’t match because:

  • ID vs id
  • dnnBreadcrumb vs dnnBREADCRUMB
  • attribute order can matter as well

This seems common in commercial skins, so Edit Theme Attributes can’t update those objects unless the ASCX tag is rewritten to match the exact expected format, which gets overwritten whenever you update the theme. However, any changes made via Persona Bar would also disappear, because it is not stored in the DB for example.

Questions

Does anyone have thoughts on the best approach? Is it already an improvement if the search would be case insensitive? Are skin object names eventually case sensitive or not? If the search should be independent of the order in which the attributes are listed, it would probably need something better than a string search (real HTML/XML or maybe regex parsing).

Best regards,
Andy9999

Steps to reproduce?
  1. Try to customize a skin object that does not have the precise format in your skin's layout or container ASCX. For example breadcrumb.
  2. Set an attribute, like CleanerMarkup=TRUE
  3. It reports that it was saved successfully.
  4. No change to the ASCX file as the skin object was not found unfortunately.
Current Behavior

No response

Expected Behavior

No response

Relevant log output
Anything else?

No response

Affected Versions

10.2.0 (latest v10 release)

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

No response

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