Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Recordset Navigation

Dreamweaver’s Repeating Region tool lets you display multiple database records on a single web page. But a recordset with large amounts of data—like 1,000 employee records—can quickly choke a page. A large amount of information takes a long time to download, and forces visitors to scroll down many screens to see it all.

Fortunately, the Repeating Region tool also lets you limit the number of records displayed at once. Of course, this limit presents its own set of problems: How do visitors see additional records, and how do you let them know where they are among all the records in the recordset?

To solve this dilemma, Dreamweaver comes with two handy commands for adding navigation to a recordset—and providing useful feedback about the recordset.

Frequently Asked Question: A Little Less Repetition

I applied the Repeat Region object, and when I preview the page, the same record repeats over and over. That’s not what I wanted to do! What’s going on?

This scenario can happen when you apply a Repeat Region object, and, from the Repeat Region window, inadvertently select the wrong recordset (see Figure 24-13)—a mistake you can easily make if you include more than one recordset on a page.

The Repeat Region object adds programming code that steps through each record of a recordset. So, in practice, the Repeat Region object should get the information from the first record in a recordset and write it to the web page, and then go to the second record and add its info to the page. ...