Your online store needs to 'talk' to your visitors. You want your reminders, your messages, your labels, and even your errors to carry the personality that goes along with your brand identity.

Within AspDotNetStorefront, 'prompts' are used to generate much of the text that can be viewed on the front end of the site (and, incidentally, also in the admin console). You can use these prompts to make a very real difference - for example the 'out of box' account creation page is shown on the left. The right hand version has had prompts changed:


  


These prompts are stored in your database. They are uploaded from an Excel file or CSV file, giving you complete control, and without needing any developer skills.

Let's learn about a 'prompt' in detail. We'll experiment with the shopping cart page (that's the name for the 'stopping off' point between your product pages and your checkout. It looks like this:



​Test Yourself ... How many 'prompts' do you think there are in the image above? Remember - buttons, reminders, labels, links ... almost all of them are prompts, and therefore totally under the control of the storeowner to adopt his style. Check your answer here. 

On the shoppingcart page, pictured above, just underneath the "Checkout with PayPal" button there is a string resource.



The snippet of code includes this: 
<%$ Tokens:StringResource,shoppingcart.recurring.paypalworks %>

This code snippet shows us that there is a prompt called 'shoppingcart.recurring.paypalworks'. If we go to the AspDotNetStorefront admin console and go to Content > Manage Prompts, then we can search for 'shoppingcart.recurring.paypalworks'

 


We can see the default value ('Works with recurring payments too!').

Now, imagine that you own a store that doesn't actually offer any items on a 'recurring payment' ... you might still offer PayPal and it might be that you'd sooner remind your shoppers that PayPal lets them pay with all leading credit cards. Simply edit your prompt ...

 

And now your shopping cart page reflects your own changes ...




 


As well as allowing you to stamp your brand 'persona' onto your store, it also makes translating your site into other languages extremely easy, as all you have to do is translate the initial Excel file and then upload it to your site. There is more information on localizing your site here. 

From the Content menu, click Manage Prompts.

Editing Prompts

1. Use the Filters at the top of the page to locate a prompt to edit. You can enter search terms in the Name (ex: signin.aspx.11) and/or Value (example: "Please enter your e-mail address") fields. You can also choose a Locale and/or Store from the available dropdown menus, and filter by prompts that have already been Modified.
   
   Many prompts are named based on the page the prompt is displayed on. If you would like to change a text prompt that displays on the front-end Create Account page (createaccount.aspx), try typing 'createaccount' into the name field in your filter.
   
   
2. From the grid at the bottom of the page, click the prompt Name to edit the prompt.
    
   
   
3. In the Value field, type the new prompt, and click Save.
    

Adding Prompts

New prompts can be added to the store from the admin console. Be aware that in order for the string to be displayed, the site's page where you wish the string to be displayed will have to be modified to 'call' that string.

1. From the top of the Prompts page, click Create Prompt.
    
   
   
2. Enter the new prompt's Name, Value, Locale and Store settings, then click Save.
   The Name field is how the prompt is referred to from within the skin or code files. The Value field is the actual content of the prompt, that will be visible on the store. 

Reload from Excel file on Server

It may become necessary during the setup/maintenance of your site to reload the entire prompt list.  You may want to reset prompts to the default, or you may be installing a new locale (language) etc. This option allows administrators to change many prompts at once instead of editing individually as explained above.  The prompts are pulled from files in the /StringResources folder on the server where the software is installed.  The spreadsheet files can be either Excel files (97-2003 format) or CSV files, and should be named strings.en-US.xls or strings.en-US.csv ('en-US' can be replaced by other locale codes for multi-language sites).

1. From the Prompts page, click Reload from Excel file on Server, then then choose the locale you want to reload strings for:
    
   
   
2. Check the boxes for Replace Existing, and/or Leave my modified prompts, then click Reload Review.
   • Replace Existing: If checked, the software will overwrite existing prompts. Use this option if you are importing a new file that contains some old prompts as well as new prompts and you want to replace them all.
   • Leave my modified prompts: If checked, the software will leave any prompts which have been modified in their current, modified state. Modified prompts will not be overwritten.
     
     
3. The next screen will show a preview of the changes which are going to be made. The status column will indicate whether a prompt will be imported. Click Begin Reload Processing to start the import. This may take some time to process, a status screen will display once the process is complete.
   
   Note that if your site has 2 files with the same name other than extension (for example, strings.en-US.xls and strings.en-US.csv), both files will be loaded, with the CSV file going first.  This means that if any prompts exist in both files, the ones in the Excel file will 'win', overwriting those in the CSV.
   

Reload from an Excel file on your PC

This allows you to upload a string file from the local PC you're working on instead of using one already loaded on the server.

The steps are the same as for reloading from the server (see above), except that you must specify the file to be uploaded first.

1. From the Prompts page, click Reload from Excel file on your PC, then then choose the locale you want to reload strings for:
   
   
   
2. Click Browse to upload an Excel or CSV file from your PC. Check the boxes for Replace Existing and/or Leave my modified prompts if desired. Click Upload to review and start the import.