Frontpage 2000 custom design time components

Christian Ernst Rysgaard
Senior System Developer Consultant
Software Research Department, SimCorp A/S

Created Apr 5, 2000

Click to get the source files for this technical article

Introduction

This project was started in order to check out the functionality of frontpage 2000 custom components. All you need to start developing webbots for fp2000 is to read, understand and download the frontpage sdk from the following url. Best place to read about all the techno stuff is probably in the fp98 sdk documentation

Development

The sdk comes with a few samples from which i've snipped the sample fpbotkit/vbbot. This sample is a small mfc based webbot that acts as a proxy to call vb activex dll's implementing a specific interface. The vb part of the sample can be found in fpbotkit/vbbot/vbtest. If you create your version from this skeleton, please notice that your own vb projects must be named Webbot (notice the capital W) since the mfc proxy searches the registry for all progid's prefixed exactly like that. Clients will be asked for confirmation to download the mfc proxy automatically, but since the vb class is invoked from within that one, please remember to distribute the vb activex dll to all clients.

Given a webbot project <name>:

create the directory _vti_bot below \inetpub\wwwroot
create the directory <name> in _vti_bot
add the files <name>.dll, <name>.inf to that directory
modify all entries in the proxy, make sure functions <name>_edit and <name>_insert are exported
open the root web in frontpage 2000 and press Tools|Recalculate Hyperlinks...
your webbot should turn up in Insert|Components|Additional Components...

HTML layout

The basic idea behind the techno is to create a wizard like frontend to maintain a part of a html file marked out between two webbot comment tags like this:

<html><head></head><body>

CONTENTS

</body></html>

The following notation has been used:

Variable	Description
BOTNAME	Name of the custom component (denoted webbot)
PREVIEW	Html shown in the preview windows of frontpage
VARIABLES	the variables of the webbot
CONTENTS	the resulting HTML as seen in IE

Having inserted a webbot in a page, frontpage will ask the components to update its contents based on the settings of the variables within the webbot comments. The result will be that users requesting the page in ordinary fashion using any favorite browser, will only see the CONTENTS part, since the rest is just comments as far as the browser is concerned.

Updating hyperlinks in a web will also update contents of all frontpage components within that web. Use that to force layout changes to you entire web or refresh design time database queries.

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