Chapter25.Working with Dynamic Data

Chapter 25. Working with Dynamic Data

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Connecting to a Database through a DSN

• Building the Dorknozzle Application

• Working with Recordsets

• Working with Dynamic Elements

• Recordset Paging

• Showing Specific Regions

• Repeating Regions

• Working with DataSets and ASP.NET

• Displaying Record Counts

• Working with DataGrids

• Creating Master/Detail Pages

• Working with DataLists

• Using Live Data View

Throughout the book you've learned about numerous important introductory level concepts as they relate to web application development. First, you learned about dynamic web pages and what web applications are. Next, you learned how to define a site and set up necessary testing server parameters so that you can use technologies like ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, and PHP in Dreamweaver. Then you saw how databases such as Access, MSDE, and MySQL can serve as a backbone for data in your organization. You learned about the various databases, what tables, columns, and rows are, and how to take existing databases and restore them in your database management system for use within Dreamweaver. Finally, you reviewed the structured query language and more specifically how SQL provides the means for extracting, inserting, modifying, and deleting information from the database. What you haven't learned to this point is how to take all those foundation-level concepts and bring them together using Dreamweaver to create a truly dynamic database-driven page. That's where this chapter comes in.

In this chapter, we'll take all the concepts you've learned up to this point and put them into practice. You'll see how to connect Dreamweaver to your specific database using DSN and DSN-less connections. Next you'll learn about extracting data from the database to create the view catalog page for the Dorknozzle employee store. As we progress, you'll learn about the many features exposed in the Application panel to help you interact with your dynamic web pages easily in Dreamweaver. Starting to get excited? Good! This is where the previous 24 chapters begin to come together to form web applications.

As you've done with the rest of the chapters in this book, you can work with the examples in this chapter by downloading the files from www.dreamweaverunleashed.com. Remember, you'll want to save the files for Chapter 25 (not the folder) in the C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Dorknozzle<technology> directory, where <technology> represents the server technology (ASP, ASPX, CFM, PHP) you plan to use. Of course, make sure that your site is also properly defined in Dreamweaver including the appropriate server-side technology you plan to use in the Testing Server category.