Determining Why the Component Was Activated

The component attributes dictionary contains six extra synthesized state variables, in addition to the component’s own state variables. They tell you why the component was activated, and give you information about the location of the page.

The Method attribute is used to tell Form components they are being awakened as a result of a HTTP POST method from their own form.

• If Method = Expand, then the component should generate its appearance consistent with an HTTP GET request.
  
  
• If Method = Evaluate, then the component should interpret the form data submitted by the HTTP POST request and generate the appropriate results.

The Parse attribute can be used to determine if the page is going to be cached or not.

• If Parse = Static, the page is either being saved from FrontPage or regenerated due to a dependency change
  
  
• If Parse = Dynamic, the page is either handling a form submission or being fetched dynamically with a URL like _vti_bin/shtml.exe/webpage.htm.

The PageURL attribute provides the web-relative URL of the page on which the component lives.

The DocumentRoot attribute provides the absolute path to the web’s root directory on the local file system. This path uses the local filesystem convention for path separator characters, so on a Windows system it will use a backslash (“\”) instead of the forward-slash (“/”) used in URLs.

The WebURL attribute provides the absolute URL of the web.

The BaseDocURL attribute was new in FrontPage 98; it provides the web-relative URL of the outer-most containing page in which the component is being expanded. This information is useful when the page where the component lives is included inside another document. For example, if a FrontPage component is defined in the top border page of a FrontPage 98 or FrontPage 2000 web and then the page “test.htm” that includes the top border is saved, the component will be expanded with PageURL set to “_borders/top.htm” and BaseDocURL set to “test.htm”.