Chapter 21: Building MasterDetail Page Sets

Overview

The way you choose to organize information in your web application will ensure its success or failure. The tried-and-true method is to organize information into a hierarchy that allows the site visitor to "drill down" from general categories in a top-level or master list of information to the specific item they want.

As a web developer, you'll find yourself coding script pages that use the drill-down model again and again and again. Luckily, Dreamweaver MX provides tools to help you quickly build web applications based on the drill-down model. You can build a master/detail page set in Dreamweaver MX in two ways. If you are writing Active Server Pages (ASP) or JavaServer Pages (JSP) script or working with ColdFusion MX, you can use the Master Detail Page Set Server Behavior. If you are working in ASP.NET or PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), you can use Dream- weaver MX Server Behaviors such as Repeat Region and Go To Detail Page to build your master/ detail page set component by component. This chapter describes how to build master/detail pages using both methods, and both are easy to use.