Stephen
stephen at bondsoftware.co.nz
Fri Dec 14 11:44:00 CST 2007
Ditto stephen at bondsoftware.co.nz -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of S Lee (Career Svcs.) Sent: Saturday, 15 December 2007 5:46 a.m. To: Stephen Subject: Re: [AccessD] OT: FrontPage Websites I'd appreciate seeing your VB code, thanks! slee at asu.edu -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Drew Wutka Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 9:27 AM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: [AccessD] OT: FrontPage Websites We've had a lot of talk about web interfaces, and a thought occurred to me that I felt like sharing. When I built a handful of pages, I tend to use Microsoft Scripting Editor. It's a very handy tool. But I tend to write most of my web pages by hand. With the scripting editor, the HTML stuff is intellisensed, so it just pours onto the page. However, when it comes to an actual site, I use FrontPage. FrontPage is loaded with all sorts of nifty tools when dealing with an actual site. One of the nicest features is FrontPage's navigation feature. When you build a site in FrontPage, you can add pages to it's navigation. The Navigation is represented in FrontPage like a big visio chart. You can drag pages into it, move them around (by dragging), even add external links. It's pretty handy. The only catch with it's navigation, is using it on the site. FrontPage provides 'canned' tools to use with it's navigation. You can put a page banner on a page, and menus, but they are all provided by FrontPage and are not truly customizable. So a few years ago, I reversed engineered FP's navigation. It turns out that it stores it's navigation in a delimited flat file called structure.cnf. Take a look at http://www.marlow.com <http://www.marlow.com/> . All of the navigation stuff uses FP's navigation structure, read by a VB .dll. So the menu's are javascripts (for look and animation), created by asp code using the VB .dll's information. This information is used for the top menu (side menus that some pages have), the bottom menu, and as you dig into the site, there's a 'reverse path' in the top right of the page, also built by the asp/.dll combo. Because I'm using the structure.cnf information on my own, I can tweak things, such as the product information. There are only three pages for our products, but the site 'sees' lots of pages. The .dll knows if the web page being displayed is a product page, so it connects to the product database and 'spoofs' the information. For example, http://internet/Products/productlist.asp?ProductType=19 to FrontPage is just productlist.asp. But the .dll knows it's a page that lists a 'type' of product, so it pulls up the product type name 'Accessories' and sets the page header info to 'Accessories', so that information shows up for the title of the page, and in the menus of the site. Anyhow, if this piques anyone's curiosity, give me a holler, I'd be more then happy to share my vb code for this stuff. Drew -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com