Operation Manual

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USING DREAMWEAVER
Building Spry pages visually
Last updated 3/28/2012
• Specify a name for the new data set. The default name is ds1 the first time you create a data set. The data set name
can contain letters, numbers, and underscores, but cannot start with a number.
• Specify the path to the file that contains your XML data source. The path can be a relative path to a local file in
your site (for example, datafiles/data.xml), or an absolute URL to a page on the web (using HTTP or HTTPS).
You can click the Browse button to navigate to a local file and select it.
Dreamweaver renders the XML data source in the Row Elements window, displaying the XML tree of data
elements available for selection. Repeating elements are marked with a plus (+) sign, and child elements are
indented.
Alternatively you can specify a Design Time Feed as your data source. For more information, see “Use a design-
time feed” on page 446.
• Select the element that contains the data you want to display. Typically this element is a repeating element, such
as <menu_item>, with several children elements, such as <item>, <link>, <description>, and so on.
Selecting a repeating element for the XML data set.
Once you select the container element for the data set, Dreamweaver displays a preview of the data set in the
Data Preview window. The XPath text box displays an expression that shows where the selected node is located
in the XML source file.
Note: XPath (XML Path Language) is a syntax for addressing portions of an XML document. It is used mostly as
a query language for XML data, just as the SQL language is used to query databases. For more information on
XPath, see the XPath language specification on the W3C website at
www.w3.org/TR/xpath.
• When you’re finished in the Specify Data Source screen, click Done to create the data set right away, or click
Next to go on to the Set Data Options screen. If you click Done, the data set becomes available in the Bindings
panel (Window
> Bindings).