Techniques and tips for writing scripts
Position of scripts
It is standard
practice to put client-side scripts in the Head section of your document,
but the Page view in the HTML editor does not handle scripts in
the Head section. To author and debug scripts in a PowerDynamo server,
you should put scripts at the beginning of the Body section.
In addition:
- Scripts are not allowed
within a TEXTAREA or SELECT tag. - There are restrictions for server scripts
that build client scripts.
Balanced HTML that the editor can understand
Page view in
the HTML editor requires valid HTML. So if you use a script to build
part of an element and use straight HTML for the rest of the element,
the editor will have trouble displaying the page containing the
element in Page view. If you use the debugger, you will not want
to avoid Page view, so make sure the HTML on your page is balanced.
Start and finish an element in HTML or start and finish it in a
script, but do not start in one mode and finish in the other.
For example, if a script is providing data for a table, you
might consider it easier to code the table’s heading row
in HTML and then include a script for the data. To take advantage
of the editor and debugging, it would be a better choice to create
the heading row in the script too, even if it seems like a little more
work. When you save a page containing unbalanced client- and server-side
script, the editor may alter part of the script that displays in
the integrated Script editor.
Server scripts that build client scripts
If a server script
creates a client script, the debugging interface in the editor will not
know anything about the client script, since it does not exist in
the page the editor sees. There are certainly no restrictions
on building scripts this way, but be aware that you will not be
able to debug the client script. You can debug the server script
to make sure it is creating the client script correctly.
URLs in scripts
A Web target manages links in
HTML pages and JSPs. It remaps the URLs according to the directory
structure of the target or deployed site. However, a Web target
cannot manage URLs in scripts the way it manages URLs in HTML attributes.
Therefore, when you build URLs dynamically in a script, use methods
provided in the Web Target object model to get information about
the server and directory structure so that the URLs reflect the
current environment.
The following methods belong to psDocumentClass and can be
used to build a URL dynamically:
- File
- FileExtension
- Path
- Site
Example
To build an URL, your script might include code like this:
|
1 |
"http://" + psDocument.Site() + "/" + filefortoday + ".htm"; |