Front and Center: How Interactive Buttons Work

Now you know how to insert and configure an Interactive Button, but you might not know exactly what an Interactive Button is and how it works. It's actually simpler than you might think.

When you insert an Interactive Button, FrontPage creates graphic files using the information you provide in the Interactive Buttons dialog. FrontPage uses the graphics located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\BUTTONS by default. It then creates composite graphics on-the-fly to include whatever text you include on the button.

After FrontPage has created the graphic files, it generates the code to do the image swapping by using a Swap Image Behavior and a Swap Image Restore Behavior. If you select the Interactive Button and switch to the Behaviors task pane, you will see that FrontPage has automatically inserted Behaviors to add interactivity to your buttons.

For this reason, if you ever modify the Swap Image Behavior or the Swap Image Restore Behavior in any way, take note that you will also be changing the behavior of your Interactive Buttons.

If you find that the options available for an Interactive Button are not meeting your needs, you can use Behaviors in FrontPage to create your own dynamic buttons. You can either create graphics from scratch, or you can use the graphics FrontPage generated for some of your Interactive Buttons and modify them in an image editing program to suit your needs. Once you have the graphics ready for your dynamic button, you can use the Swap Image Behavior and the Swap Image Restore Behavior to add interactivity to them.

For more information on the Swap Image Behavior and the Swap Image Restore Behavior, see "The Swap Image Behavior," p. 470, and "The Swap Image Restore Behavior," p. 471.