Operation Manual

550
USING DREAMWEAVER
Making pages dynamic
Last updated 3/28/2012
More Help topics
“Defining sources of dynamic content” on page 536
“Create a recordset navigation bar” on page 556
“Display multiple recordset results” on page 558
“Applying typographic and page layout elements to dynamic data” on page 555
“Use predefined data formats” on page 563
About dynamic text
Dynamic text adopts any text formatting applied to the existing text or to the insertion point. For example, if a
Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) style affects the selected text, the dynamic content replacing it is also affected by the style.
You can add or change the text format of dynamic content by using any of the Dreamweaver text formatting tools.
You can also apply a data format to dynamic text. For example, if your data consists of dates, you can specify a
particular date format such as 04/17/00 for U.S. visitors, or 17/04/00 for Canadian visitors.
Make text dynamic
You can replace existing text with dynamic text, or you can place dynamic text at a given insertion point on the page.
More Help topics
“About recordsets” on page 530
“Use predefined data formats” on page 563
Add dynamic text
1 In Design view, select text on the page, or click where you want to add dynamic text.
2 In the Bindings panel (Window > Bindings), select a content source from the list. If you select a recordset, specify
the column you want in the recordset.
The content source should contain plain text (ASCII text). Plain text includes HTML. If no content sources appear in
the list, or if the available content sources don’t meet your needs, click the Plus (+) button to define a new content
source.
3 (Optional) Select a data format for the text.
4 Click Insert, or drag the content source onto the page.
A dynamic content placeholder appears. (If you selected text on the page, the placeholder replaces the text selection.)
The placeholder for recordset content uses the syntax
{RecordsetName.ColumnName}, where Recordset is the name
of the recordset and
ColumnName is the name of the column you chose from the recordset.
Sometimes, the length of the placeholders for dynamic text distorts the page’s layout in the Document window. You
can solve the problem by using empty curly braces as placeholders, as described in the next topic.
Display placeholders for dynamic text
1 Select Edit > Preferences > Invisible Elements (Windows) or Dreamweaver > Preferences > Invisible Elements
(Macintosh).
2 In the Show Dynamic Text As pop-up menu, select { }, and click OK.