MACROMEDIA DREAMWEAVER 8-EXTENDING DREAMWEAVER, Manual

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15
CHAPTER 15
Server Behaviors
Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 provides users with an interface for adding server behaviors into
their documents to perform server-side tasks such as filtering records based on user criteria,
paging through records, linking result lists to details pages, and inserting records into a result
set. If a Dreamweaver user repeatedly inserts the same runtime code into documents, you can
create a new extension to automate updating a document with these frequently used code
blocks. For details about working with the Server Behavior Builder interface to implement a
custom server behavior, see “Adding Custom Server Behaviors” in
Getting Started with
Dreamweaver . Then, refer to this chapter for details about working with the supporting server
behavior files and the functions that interact with established server behaviors. For individual
function information, see “Server Behavior functions” and “Extension Data Manager
functions” in the
Dreamweaver API Reference . Dreamweaver currently supports server
behavior extensions that add runtime code for the following server models: ASP.Net/C#,
ASP.Net/VisualBasic, ASP/JavaScript, ASP/VBScript, ColdFusion, JSP, and PHP/MySQL.
The following terms are used throughout this chapter:
■
Server behavior extension The server behavior extension is the interface between server-
side code and Dreamweaver. A server behavior extension consists of JavaScript, HTML,
and Extension Data Markup Language (EDML), which is XML that is created specifically
for extension data. Examples of these files reside in your installation folder in the
Configuration/ServerBehaviors folder, arranged according to server model. When you
script an extension, use the
dwscripts.applySB()
function to instruct Dreamweaver to
read the EDML files, retrieve the components of your extension, and add the appropriate
code blocks to the user’s document.
■
Server behavior instance When Dreamweaver adds code blocks to a user’s document,
the inserted code constitutes an instance of the server behavior. The user can apply most
server behaviors more than once, which results in multiple server behavior instances. Each
server behavior instance is listed in the Server Behaviors panel of the Dreamweaver
interface.