ASP in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16. Content Linking Component

Webmasters attempting to reach a wider audience often model their web sites to fit a paradigm familiar to the site's clients. One popular paradigm is that of a book or a newspaper. Users unfamiliar with the web and the power of hyperlinking are often looking for just such a paradigm to help ease them from paper-based information to web-based information. The familiar context of a current page, previous page, and next page is very comfortable and easy to understand.

The links from page to page are simple and easy to navigate. Each page has only a link to the previous page (if it exists) and a link to the next page (if it exists). This simple theme has not only helped to reach a wider audience but also to present large quantities of information, such as that in a newspaper archive, for example.

The only problem with such a system is that maintenance, while simple, can be extremely tedious. For example, imagine that you have four pages and decide to remove the third, thus altering the Next link on the second page and the Previous link on the fourth. This change is a simple one. Now, imagine you have a thousand pages, and you must remove 90 of them from various places in the series. Such a task would be tedious and therefore error prone, to say the least. Thankfully, there is a better way.

Starting as an unsupported add-on, Microsoft introduced the Content Linking component. Using the Content Linking component, you can perform maintenance much more ...