Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Passing Information Between Pages

Every now and then, you’ll want to pass a piece of information from one page to another. The Master Detail Page Set tool described in the previous section uses this concept: A link on the master page not only points to the detail page, but also passes along a unique ID used to create a filtered recordset on the detail page. In other words, the master page lists a bunch of records from a database. Each record not only links to the detail page, but also passes along its unique ID. The link might be something like adDetails?adID=7.

The information after the ? in the URL is a URL parameter, which the detail page uses to build a recordset. In this example, the detail page would find only one record—the one whose adID is 7—and display its details on the page. The key to the success of the master detail page set, then, is the ability to pass information to another page, and then use that information to filter a recordset (see page 639 for details on filtering database records).

Dreamweaver MX can pass information to other dynamic pages using either of two tools: the Go To Detail Page and Go To Related Page server behaviors.

Note

These two tools are only available for the ASP and JSP server models. For a description of server behaviors, see the box on page 693.

Go To Detail Page

A detail page, logically enough, is intended to provide more details on a single database record. To retrieve details on only one record, the detail page must include a recordset that ...