Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4

Step 2
Clothing - Static HTML with PARAM elements. Lets try some control over the Active Label ActiveX before continuing.

Visual Edit etc. Layout and printing


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copies.

Before doing something substantial lets try some control over the ActiveX. Doing this now will help us concentrate on most important tasks further. We do not actually need most of the things on this page, but they are interesting nevertheless. 

First of all note that printing will look ugly without data, most elements will not have values etc. But you can see the behavior of the control when instructed to use the data source, but there is no data. If you click use data source and then print - the operation will fail and nothing will be sent to the printer. With Don't use data source (default) you can print static copies of the label (as seen on the screen at that moment).

Almost all the code invoked by the buttons and the other elements is in their onClick attributes. Only "Get element list" uses a separate function to fill the drop down box with the list of the elements on the label.

You can play with the controls and see what they do and check the page source to see how. As you will see some actions are not applicable in certain situations. For instance the list of the elements selects the element selected in it, but this has effect only if the edit mode is enabled.

The most important goal we had was to allow the pages interact with the control with as little code as possible. We hope we did it - for most operations you just need to know which object to access and which property to change or which method to call. In most cases there is no collateral work needed and if it is it is quite straightforward and related to DHTML programming and not the Active Label itself. A bit more code may be needed only if you want to implement complex data related operations with a Javascript code on the page, but this is understandable.

On the next step we will remove all that stuff and get closer to the real world.