User Guide

Dreamweaver architecture 249

Participant files

A participant represents a single code block on the page, such as a server tag, an HTML tag, or an

attribute. A participant file must be listed in a group file to be available to a Dreamweaver

document author. Several group files can use a single participant file.

For example, the moveTo_declareParam.edml file contains the following code:

<![CDATA[

<% var MM_paramName = ""; %>

]]>

</insertText>

</searchPatterns>

</participant>

When Dreamweaver adds a server behavior to a document, it needs to have detailed information,

including where to insert the code, what the code looks like, and what parameters the

Dreamweaver author or data replaced at runtime. Each participant EDML file describes these

details for each block of code. Specifically, the participant file describes the following data:

• The code and where to put the unique instance are defined by the insertText tag parameters,

as shown in the following example:

• How to recognize instances already on the page are defined by the searchPatterns tag, as

shown in the following example:

</searchPatterns>

In the searchPatterns block tag, each searchPattern tag contains a pattern that finds

instances of runtime code and extracts specific parameters. For more details, see “Server behavior

techniques” on page 286.

The script file

Each server behavior also has an HTML file that contains functions and links to the scripts that

manage the integration of the server behavior code with the Dreamweaver interface. The

functions that are available for editing in this file are discussed in “Server behavior

implementation functions” on page 258.

Hello World example

This example shows the process of creating a new server behavior so you can see the files that

Dreamweaver generates and how to handle them. For details about working with the Server

Behavior Builder interface, see “Adding Custom Server Behaviors” in Getting Started with

Dreamweaver. The example displays “Hello World” from the ASP server. The Hello World

behavior has only one participant (a single ASP tag) and does not modify or add anything else on

the page.

Note: This example refers to functions that are defined later in this chapter.