About Standalone Renderer Objects

The ContainerRenderer and ObjectRenderer objects are known as top-level objects because they can be created directly by your code, without having to be derived from another object. When created directly, such an object is known as a standalone renderer object because it has no parent link—a pointer to the object it was created by or added to.

Because a standalone renderer has no parent link to the RenderingApplication object, it does not have the support methods of the RenderingApplication object. Nor is there a global format collection, so the virtroot and classpath objects would not exist.

To create a ContainerRenderer or ObjectRenderer standalone object, use the Active Server Pages syntax Server.CreateObject, naming the object AMHTML.ContainerRenderer or AMHTML.ObjectRenderer.

In general, standalone renderer objects are best used for single operations, such as rendering certain properties of the current object. When you use standalone renderer objects, you generally do not intend to read more data from the object or access it in other ways.

Renderers need not be standalone. That is, you can choose to derive objects of these types from a RenderingApplication object, as shown in the following section.