Spry Data Sets

Spry data sets and Dreamweaver

Spry Data Sets were introduced into Dreamweaver with Adobe CS3 and were enhanced with the latest version CS4. On a tutorial page at Adobe it states: "Spry data sets allow you to dynamically display related data throughout your entire website without having to rely on databases or server-side scripting."

A Dreamweaver menu gives you many choices the very first of which is the one we want:

Below is the first box you see, select the Data type, XML in our case, give it a name, and then select the row. The data is conveniently previewed below.

Next you can select the data types for the data if numbers are to be displayed. In our case everything is the default: text.

Next we choose the type of presentation as shown below. Actually these can be set up manually as well as using this wizard

Clicking the setup box allows you to reorder and remove the columns you want - you can use CSS to control formatting for odd and even rows and Hover and Select classes.

Below is the HTML as it appears in Dreamweaver with placeholders in brackets {} for Head, body, Link, CreationDate, and image. The link and image are embedded with the link data: e.g.
<td><img src="webpub/spry5.jpg" alt="spry5" width="723" height="234" /></td>

The data can be arranged and formatted to the nth degree to meet your needs.

This is what creates the info fo my News page (click here). There is so much more you can do with data sets but it is beyond the scope of this article.

Next: The Scodigo PHP Plugin

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