Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS4 Bible

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W

ith the power to access the data of the world—or at least your

part of it—comes great responsibility. As a Web page designer

you determine how best to present that information. Not only

does this include the surrounding look-and-feel but also how the data itself is

structured. How many records should you show at once? One? Ten? All? How

should the user navigate from one group of records to another? What should

the user see when there are no more records to display? Obviously, there

are no definitive answers to these questions; each response must take into

account the intent of the page, the type of data involved, and the audience for

that data. This chapter can’t give you precise solutions for every Web applica-

tion, but it does give you the tools to devise your own resolutions.

Displaying Data Conditionally

What makes a Web page into a Web application? Connectivity to a data

source by itself does not make a Web application—after all, you’re merely

setting up the possibility for data integration, not actually utilizing it.

Some would say that it is the power to programmatically control the dis-

play of the data that is at the heart of an application. Dreamweaver handles

this conditional display of data primarily through its Server Behaviors

panel. You can, for example, opt to display the data—or any other page

element—only if certain conditions are met, such as an empty record ...