Advanced HTML Design

Using adapters and adapter page producers, WebSnap makes it easy to create scripted HTML pages in your Web server application. You can create a Web front end for your application data using WebSnap tools that may suit all of your needs. One powerful feature of WebSnap, however, is the ability to incorporate Web design expertise from other sources into your application. This section discusses some strategies for expanding the Web server design and maintenance process to include other tools and non-programmer team members.

The end products of WebSnap development are your server application and HTML templates for the pages that the server produces. The templates include a mixture of scripting and HTML. Once they have been generated initially, they can be edited at any time using any HTML tool you like. (It would be best to use a tool that supports embedded script tags, like Microsoft FrontPage, to ensure that the editor doesn't accidentally damage the script.) The ability to edit template pages outside of the IDE can be used many ways.

After the product has been deployed, you may wish to change the look of the final HTML pages. Perhaps your software development team is not even responsible for the final page layout. That duty may belong to a dedicated Web page designer in your organization, for example. Your page designers may not have any experience with software development. Fortunately, they don't have to. They can edit the page templates at any point in the product development and maintenance cycle, without ever changing the source code. Thus, WebSnap HTML templates can make server development and maintenance more efficient.

Manipulating server-side script in HTML files

HTML in page templates can be modified at any time in the development cycle. Server-side scripting can be a different matter, however. It is always possible to manipulate the server-side script in the templates outside of the IDE, but it is not recommended for pages generated by an adapter page producer. The adapter page producer is different from ordinary page producers in that it can change the server-side scripting in the page templates at runtime. It can be difficult to predict how your script will act if other script is added dynamically. If you want to manipulate script directly, make sure that your Web page module contains a page producer instead of an adapter page producer.

If you have a Web page module that uses an adapter page producer, you can convert it to use a regular page producer instead by using the following steps.

To modify a Web page module to use a regular page producer

You can access the page module view with server-side scripting using the HTML Script tab. In the module you want to convert (let's call it ModuleName), copy all of the information from the HTML Script tab to the ModuleName.html tab, replacing all of the information that it contained previously.
Note: When the Web Page module uses TAdapterPageProducer the page module views become available when this component is double-clicked .
Drop a page producer (located on the Internet category of the Tool Palette) onto your Web page module.
Set the page producer's ScriptEngine property to match that of the adapter page producer it replaces.
Change the page producer in the Web page module from the adapter page producer to the new page producer.
The adapter page producer has now been bypassed. You may now delete it from the Web page module.

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