Specifications

Chapter 14158
Example
The following example deletes all the participants of the sbObj server behavior, except the
participants that are protected by the EDML file’s
<delete> tag.
function deleteServerBehavior(sbObj) {
dwscripts.deleteSB(sbObj);
}
Editing EDML files
You must maintain Dreamweaver coding conventions when you edit a file. Pay attention to the
dependency of one element upon another. For example, if you update the tags that are being
inserted, you might also need to update the search patterns.
Note: EDML files are new in Dreamweaver MX. If you are working with legacy server behaviors, see the earlier
versions of the Extending Dreamweaver manuals.
Regular expressions
You must understand regular expressions as they are implemented in JavaScript 1.5. Also, you
must know when it is appropriate to use them in the server behavior EDML files. For example,
regular expressions cannot be used in
quickSearch values, but they are used in searchPattern
to find and extract data.
Regular expressions describe text strings by using characters that are assigned with special
meanings (metacharacters) to represent the text, break it up, and process it according to
predefined rules. Regular expressions are powerful parsing and processing tools because they
provide a generalized way to represent a pattern.
Good reference books on JavaScript 1.5 have a regular expression section or chapter. This section
examines how Dreamweaver server behavior EDML files use regular expressions in order to find
parameters in your runtime code and extract their values. Each time a user edits a server behavior,
prior parameter values need to be extracted from the instances of the runtime code. This
extraction process is done by using regular expressions.
You should understand a few metacharacters and metasequences (special character groupings)
that are useful in server behavior EDML files, as described in the following table.
The EDML tag
<searchPatterns whereToSearch="directive"> declares that runtime code
needs to be searched. Each
<searchPattern>...</searchPattern> subtag defines one pattern
in the runtime code that must be identified. For the Redirect If Empty example, there are two
patterns.
Regular Expression Description
\ Escapes special characters. For example: \. reverts the metacharacter back to a
literal period; \/ reverts the forward slash to its literal meaning; and, \) reverts the
parenthesis to its literal meaning.
/ ... /i Ignore case when searching for the metasequence
( ...) Creates a parenthetical subexpression within the metasequence
\s* Searches for white spaces