Hints & Tricks

The workflow of events described in this unit are a typical series of events I use to build databased websites. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Troubleshooting Your Pages

After uploading and testing your pages, you may find that they don't work as expected. Typical problems include these:

• Only the test record is displayed; modifying the search or other parameters results in no change
  This is a common problem. In any type of detail page, it's important to have a hidden field that stores the id of the found record. The problem occurs because the server can't "lock" the record due to the missing id field.
• Nothing changes
  Are you sure you uploaded your changed pages and reloaded your browser?

Where To From Here?

Though extensive, this is really just an introduction to the concept of databased webpages using the combination of PHP and MySQL. Other concepts can be investigated and the techniques refined.

One area not covered is recordset paging. Most of the time when I create webpages, I don't use it but often it's required. Recordset paging offers your users a certain number of records on a single page, providing next page and previous page links to allow the visitor to move through records. Perhaps this will be built into a future version of this lesson.

Don't underestimate the value of the help system built into Dreamweaver! I manage to extricate myself from problems with it quite often.

One place I strongly recommend you visit is the Dreamweaver Developer Center on macromedia.com. There you will find a wealth of resources designed to take you to the next step of web application development. The sections on Databases, PHP, and CSS are particularly noteworthy in the context of this lesson. You can also find similar tutorials and sample applications to download and inspect.

Another resource found there is the Dreamweaver Exchange (linked in Resources). There, you will find an enormous wealth of extensions (server behaviors, etc.) designed to help you do more powerful development within Dreamweaver. On the Extensions page, the category called App Servers is of particular importance to web developers. You will find many free (and more that require payment) extensions that will help you do more with Dreamweaver. Read each extension's instructions carefully to see how it is implemented in Dreamweaver. The lesson here doesn't use any extensions but the dozen or so I have installed on my computer improve my experience dramatically.

Your Feedback is Requested

A reminder: this is a living document and it is likely to change (or move) over time. If you have comments about this tutorial or suggestions for improvement, please e-mail jrosb at mac dot com.