User Guide

218 Chapter 12: Property Inspectors
The following comment is appropriate for an inspector that is designed to inspect the HAPPY tag:
<!-- tag:HAPPY, priority:8,selection:exact,hline,vline, ¬
serverModel:ASP -->
In some cases, you might want to specify that your extension use only Dreamweaver extension
rendering (and not the previous rendering engine) by inserting the following line immediately
before the Tag comment, as shown in the following example:
<!--DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM “-//Macromedia//DWEtension layout-engine 5.0//pi”-->
The BODY section of a Property inspector file contains an HTML form. Instead of displaying the
form contents in a dialog box, however, Dreamweaver uses the form to define the input areas and
layout of the inspector.
How Property inspector files work
At start up, Dreamweaver reads the first line of each HTM and HTML file in the Configuration/
Inspectors folder, searching for the comment string that defines the type, priority, and selection
type of a Property inspector. Files that do not have this comment as their first line are ignored.
When the user makes a selection in Dreamweaver or moves the insertion point to a different
location, the following events occur:
1 Dreamweaver searches for any inspectors that have a within selection type.
2 If there are any within inspectors, Dreamweaver searches up the document tree from the
currently selected tag to check whether there are inspectors for any tags that surround the
selection. If—and only if—there are no
within inspectors, Dreamweaver searches for any
inspectors that have a selection type of
exact.
3 For the first tag that has one or more inspectors, Dreamweaver calls each inspector’s
canInspectSelection() function. If this function returns the value false, Dreamweaver no
longer considers the inspector a candidate for inspecting the selection.
4 If more than one potential inspector remains after calling the canInspectSelection()
function, Dreamweaver sorts the remaining inspectors by priority.
5 If more than one potential inspector shares the same priority, Dreamweaver selects an inspector
alphabetically by name.
6 The selected inspector appears in the Property inspector floating panel. If the Property inspector
file defines the
displayHelp() function, a small question mark (?) icon appears in the upper-
right corner of the inspector.
7 Dreamweaver calls the inspectSelection() function to gather information about the current
selection and populate the inspector’s fields.
8 Event handlers attached to the fields in the Property inspector interface execute as the user
encounters them. (For example, you might have an
onBlur event that calls the
setAttribute() function to set an attribute to the value that the user enters.)