The WordPage Menu

When WordPage is properly installed a new menu will appear in Word 2000. This menu is used to manage WordPage documents. Through it you create new datasources, manage frames, and publish your ASP pages. The specific menu items are discussed below.

Create ASP

The “Create ASP” option is used to create Active Server Pages from your WordPage documents. The process is as follows:

  1. You will be asked to enter a base path for the documents. You may browse to select a path. Note that if you browse you must select a file name which will be ignored. Only the directory information is used from the browse.
  2. If necessary WordPage will save your .HTM file.
  3. The WordPage translator creates a .ASP file with the same name as the document in the location selected in step 1. Because some browsers don’t like document names that contain spaces WordPage converts any spaces in the document name to underscores (“_”) in the .ASP file name.
  4. Any auxiliary files associated with your document (theme background images, pictures, etc.) are copied to a subdirectory under the destination location.
  5. If the document is a frameset then steps 2, 3, 4 are repeated for each frame.

Insert Datasource

Any WordPage document that accesses a database needs a datasource. The “Insert datasource” option creates a new datasource at the current position in the document. It then invokes the new datasource wizard.  The wizard asks you to select a database and the tables you wish to access. You may change the datasource or tables later using options in the datasource. To learn about datasources go here.

Note: Most types of connections have a check box which enables the password for the connections to be saved in the connection information. This option must be checked for WordPage to have the information it will need to access the database.

Frames

The Frames submenu allows you to create and manage a set of frames. Frames are one of the most powerful capabilities available to web page authors. A frame is a section of a web document that contains another document. Word 2000 and WordPage make it easy to harness this power to create cooperating sets of professional web pages. A common use for this capability is to create one frame that has a list of available inquiries and another frame that shows query results. These frames can be shown side-by-side allowing the user to select a query in one part of the browser and see the results in another. The tutorial shows an example of using frames for this purpose.

Select Target Frame

When an HTML form is submitted to the web server the results come back to the browser in another HTML document. If the browser is currently displaying multiple frames the resulting document can be directed to any of those frames. The “Select target frame” items allows you to select or enter the destination for any results produced by a document. The target frame is set automatically when you create filter fields using the field list.

Find ASP Error Line

Many of the errors that can occur on an ASP page are not detectable by WordPage as you are editing and publishing your document. When the web server detects an error it produces a web page that shows you a description of the error and the line number in the ASP file where the error was detected. Unfortunately this line number is difficult to relate back to a position in the Word 2000 document that WordPage used to produce the ASP page.

 

The “Find ASP Error Line” option is used to map an ASP line number to a location in the Word 2000 document. When you select this option you will be asked for a line number. Enter the line number that was reported by the web server. WordPage will then determine which portion of the document corresponds to the line. If the line is found WordPage produces a message telling you where the line is located and if possible positions the cursor near the error.

 

Note that if multiple WordPage code blocks exist very near each other it is possible that the actual error exists in the code block immediately before or after the one that is reported.