With this catalog we are starting a set of ALP based products for end-users and developers. This one is mostly for developers who need to prepare catalog oriented applications for autorun CDs. However it is applicable for some other applications too. The final version will include WEB server support as well.

A few words about it. 

The catalog is based on simple Microsoft Access DB with a few tables. The abstract structure includes categories and Items. Items are linked to categories (one or more). The detailed information about the items is in separate tables (articles, images, links and the final version will add also price/shipping). The details from the other tables can be linked to each other and to the items and categories.

The catalog has edit/admin pages. They can be configured to allow some of the above relations and disallow others. Thus adopting the catalog to the particular application is a matter of changing several rules (the visual tool for this is not ready - see in the default.asp in the admin directories).

The other side of the catalog is the public/presentation side. It is based on HTML templates implemented in ASP using the TextEmbedParser component from ASP Compiler. TextEmbedParser parses a HTML page (the template) and serves a tree like structure to the ASP page. The ASP page implements a set of Sub-s that are called for every node in the document tree where TEMPLATE HTML attribute points to the key name of the Sub. The Sub-s have common prototype and their purpose is to inspect the node, change its contents and attributes and (depending on the Sub purpose) to invoke the same procedure for the elements under this node (e.g. the HTML elements enclosed by the element represented by the processed node).

The effect is a very powerful template technique that uses the existing standard HTML tags. There are similar techniques in JSP and ASP.NET but none of them is based on standard HTML tags! This allows the developer to construct templates that can be opened and changed in visual HTML editor applications (such as FrontPage) without causing corruption of the HTML code.

In fact the template drives the ASP page. The template HTML is a regular HTML page with additional HTML attributes set to some of the elements in it. They specify the routines to be called from the ASP page and some parameters for them. This automatically leads to flexible and universal ASP code and allows some standard Sub-s to be prepared (in the catalog they are in the include file) and as many specialized as the developer wants to build. Thus particular template based application can be implemented with quite universal routines or with specialized ones. The settings required in the template can be many (for universal ones) and minimal (for specialized ones). This allows the developer to prepare something simple - for the non-experienced users or something complex but flexible for himself.

More details about the HTML templates are included in ASP Compiler 1.1 beta and will be published as separate articles later.

The contents of the archive

It contains ALP engine with ALPFrame and is configured to run without need to install it first - thus unpack the archive in an empty directory (with all the subdirectories) and double-click ALPFrame.exe to start it. There are 3 copies of the catalog application:

• catalog - information for the catalog itself.
• empty - empty catalog application (if you want to perform some tests etc.)
• sample - sample catalog application (a little sample data)

And in the tmlsamples directory you will find some HTML template oriented samples based only on the standard/universal parts of its code. If you are interested in the HTML template in general review them - they are simple and will show the the template idea more easilly.