Types of Custom FrontPage Components

The custom component API supports two types of components, as indicated in the component definition file:

• Insert components, which replace themselves with some HTML. The SmartHTML interpreter expands Insert components at authoring time, or at browse time if the page is fetched dynamically using a URL like _vti_bin/shtml.dll/webpage.htm. The component is replaced in the output page with the HTML it generates.
  
  
• Form components, which handle the submission of HTML form data. SmartHTML expands Form components at authoring time, but they typically do not generate HTML at that time. Instead, they wait until receiving a POST request (which they detect because the attribute Method is set to Evaluate) and typically generate an entire HTML page or redirect to a different URL.

The Insert components will appear in the Insert: FrontPage Component dialog box. The Form components will appear in the Form Properties dialog box, in the drop-down list inside the Form Handler group box.