Operation Manual

532

USING DREAMWEAVER

Making pages dynamic

Last updated 3/28/2012

A form-based survey is a typical example of a page that stores form parameters in session variables. The form sends

the selected information back to the server, where an application page scores the survey and stores the responses in a

session variable to be passed to an application that might tally up the responses gathered from the survey population.

Or the information might be stored in a database for later use.

After information is sent to the server, you store the information in session variables by adding the appropriate code

for your server model to the page specified by the URL or form parameter. Referred to as the destination page, this page

is specified in either the

action attribute of the HTML form or the href attribute of the hypertext link on the starting

page.

After you store a value in a session variable, you can use Dreamweaver to retrieve the value from session variables and

use it in a web application. After you define the session variable in Dreamweaver, you can insert its value in a page.

The HTML syntax for each appears as follows:

Both the server technology used and the method you use to obtain the information determines the code used to store

the information in a session variable. The basic syntax for each server technology is as follows:

ColdFusion

ASP

<% Session("variable_name") = value %>

The value expression is usually a server expression such as Request.Form("lastname"). For example, if you use a

URL parameter called

product (or an HTML form with the GET method and a text field called product) to gather

information, the following statements store the information in a session variable called

prodID:

ColdFusion

ASP

<% Session("prodID") = Request.QueryString("product") %>

If you use an HTML form with the post method and a text field called txtProduct to gather the information, then

the following statements store the information in the session variable:

ColdFusion

ASP

<% Session("prodID") = Request.Form("txtProduct") %>