Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Recordset Navigation

Dreamweaver’s Repeat Region tool lets you display multiple database records on a single Web page. But when recordsets retrieve large amounts of data—like 1,000 employee records—a Web page can quickly be overloaded. A large amount of information takes a long time to download and forces visitors to scroll for many screens to see all of it.

Fortunately, the tool also lets you limit the number of records displayed at one time. Of course, that presents its own set of problems: How do visitors see additional records, and how do you let them know where they are among all the records in the recordset?

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONA Little Less Repetition

I applied the Repeat Region object, and when I preview the page, the same record is repeated over and over. That’s not what I wanted to do! What’s going on?

This can happen when you apply a Repeat Region object and inadvertently select the wrong recordset from the Repeat Region window (see Figure 22-11)—a mistake that’s easy to make if you’ve included more than one recordset on a page.

The Repeat Region object adds programming code that steps through each record of a recordset. So, in practice, the Repeat Region object should get the information from the first record in a recordset and write it to the Web page, then go to the second record and add its info to the page. This process should continue until it’s either gone through all the records in the recordset or reached the limit specified in the Records at a Time box.