Activating a Custom FrontPage Component

A FrontPage component becomes active momentarily whenever the page containing the component is:

• Saved by FrontPage.
  
  
• Regenerated by the FrontPage Server Extensions due to a dependency that required updating.
  
  
• The target of an HTTP POST request, such as when a browser submits a form.
  
  
• Fetched through the SmartHTML interpreter by an HTTP-GET request (with a URL like webname/_vti_bin/shtml.exe/pagename.htm).

When a component is activated, it can perform different operations depending on the current values of its properties, the standard CGI environment variables, or any form data that a user may have submitted. Typical component operations include:

• Inserting generated HTML into the page at the FrontPage component’s location.
  
  
• Handling a form submitted to the page.
  
  
• Generating a completely new HTML page.
  
  
• Redirecting the browser to an alternate page.

To improve web performance, the FrontPage Server Extensions store the static HTML that is generated by the component directly inside the HTML page, when it is saved by FrontPage, or is updated by the FrontPage Server Extensions due to a dependency change. Because this static HTML is inside of a static page, it can be fetched with a simple HTTP-GET request rather an HTTP-POST. This avoids having to spawn a CGI process to view the page.

The following two diagrams illustrate the process of first saving a page with custom components to a web with FrontPage, and then submitting a form to the same page with a browser.

1. Saving a page with custom FrontPage components

2. Submitting a form to a page with custom FrontPage components