In Creating an HTML data set, I demonstrated how easy HTML data sets are to use in Dreamweaver CS4. HTML data sets are tables, or other structured bits of HTML, that Spry can load via Ajax. Once loaded, this data can be sliced and diced (that is, sorted, filtered, and more) in a variety of ways, making it rather easy to develop dynamic Ajax applications without needing any knowledge of JavaScript or server-side technology.

In this article I'll introduce XML data sets. I'll demonstrate that using XML data sets is as easy as using HTML data sets in Dreamweaver CS4. I'll also discuss how you can use ColdFusion to dynamically create the XML used by Spry.

Note: Before you begin, be sure you have a website defined in Dreamweaver and then download the sample files that accompany this article. Unzip the files into a new folder. You can name this anything you want; I used the name dwarticlexml. You will also need to have ColdFusion 8 installed and running with the site used in Dreamweaver. Be sure you install the example applications with ColdFusion as the database used for this tutorial's dynamic example will use them. For more information about defining a site, refer to Setting up a Dreamweaver site in Dreamweaver Help. For help with ColdFusion, read Setting up a ColdFusion development environment.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software and files:

Dreamweaver CS4

• Try
• Buy

ColdFusion 8

• Try
• Buy

Sample files:

• xml_dataset_sample.zip (ZIP, 4K)

Prerequisite knowledge

Basic HTML and XML knowledge and familiarity with the Dreamweaver workspace, site management, and building websites.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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