Tutorial

for the Dynamic Publishing System by Karl Goldstein

The lessons in this tutorial illustrate how to use the template system. The lessons are arranged in order of increasing complexity. Before you get started, you need to have done three things:

  1. Installed the template system on your server.
  2. Created a working directory to store the templates you will be writing.
  3. Loaded the sample database tables used by the lessons.

    Hello World

    How to write a simple specification file and embed dynamic content in a template.

    Hello Fred

    How to specify a data source that is dependent on another data source.

    List Users

    How to specify a data source that returns multiple rows of data and present it in a template.

    List Users II

    How to reference data sources in shared data libraries or in other template data files.

    List users in a state

    How to use a conditional expression to tailor the template output.

    A simple portal

    How to build a page from a set of subtemplates.

    A contest

    How to build specification files from a mixture of declarative and procedural code.

    Corporate contacts

    How to use multiple alternate templates to service the same data.

    Add a user

    An introduction to the form manager.

    Custom validation

    How to perform custom validation of a form element.

karlg@arsdigita.com