Design-Time Controls

Design-Time Controls and the Scripting Object Model

Overview

Microsoft^® Visual InterDev™ provides design-time controls that:

Present a graphical user interface for changing the settings that control the behavior of the run-time script that they produce.
Create run-time script objects that can target either the client or server.
Allow data binding to a remote database.

You can find the following design-time controls in the Toolbox.

To	See
Display a button	Button Control
Display a check box	Checkbox Control *
Create event-driven forms	FormManager Control *
Display data from a database in an HTML table	Grid Control *
Display text, possibly from a database	Label Control *
Provide a set of choices to an end-user	Listbox Control *
Provide a set of mutually-exclusive choices	OptionGroup Control *
Treat your page like an object	PageObject Control
Navigate between pages	PageNavbar Control
Apply a special effect when the page is entered or exited	PageTransitions Control
Make a set of records available for data binding	Recordset Control *
Use a navigator button bar for moving through a set of records	RecordsetNavbar Control *
Accept text input from an end-user	Textbox Control *
Use time to determine changes to a page	Timelines Control
Review usage for Visual InterDev 1.0 controls	Legacy Controls
Set properties at design time that affect the page	DOCUMENT

* Can be data-bound

Data-Bound Design-Time Controls

You can use data-bound design-time controls to create pages that read from and write to a database. You accomplish this by first defining a set of records with the Recordset control. You then add one or more of the data-bound controls (marked with an asterisk in the list above) and set the control's Recordset property to the name of the Recordset control.

Note A page may contain more than one Recordset control and more than one data-bound control.

For detailed information on using design-time controls to view data, see Viewing Data and Modifying Data.

Design-Time Controls and the Script Object Model

The scripting object model simplifies Web application development by introducing a familiar object-oriented programming model to HTML and script programming. The model also greatly reduces the complexity and quantity of scripting required to write applications involving interaction between client (browser) and server.

Scripting is made even easier by the design-time controls, which provide a familiar graphical interface for creating and editing script objects at design time. When you edit the design-time controls and their properties, Visual InterDev automatically writes the run-time text that is required by the scripting object model. You can think of a design-time control as a type of script builder.

For complete details about the scripting object model, see The Scripting Object Model. For information about writing script for the scripting object model and design-time controls, see Scripting with Design-Time Controls and Script Objects.