Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Designer 2007

5.1. Bits and Pieces

Web pages have always been a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. The page name a user enters into a browser's address bar rarely contains everything that will be displayed in the window by the time the rendering process is completed. Images, scripts, and style sheets are simply stated by reference, and loaded by the browser.

CGI (Common Gateway Interface) and other server-side programming systems like ASP (Active Server Pages), PHP, and ASP.NET made the rendering of Internet sites even less direct. They automate the generation of the HTML, which is used to assemble the pieces for the final page rendering. While these systems have often been used to present information stored in databases, rarely has the combination of database, application code, and physical files been as balanced as that used by SharePoint.

5.1.1. Here, There, and Everywhere

Leaving aside the client-side final assembly by the browser, a SharePoint server normally combines information from a number of locations to create a page.

The first stage is the configuration database. Based upon the URL entered, SharePoint determines which web application and site collection are being requested, and which content database contains files for that site collection. The server then looks up which row in the AllUserData table of that database represents the page in question.

This is where things start to get interesting. Most pages on a SharePoint site are assembled from a combination of a file-based template and ...