How WebSTAR Lasso Publisher Works

WebSTAR Lasso Publisher sits between WebSTAR and your database acting as an interpreter, sometimes called "middleware", between web pages and databases.

When WebSTAR Lasso Publisher is invoked the following process occurs:

1 Using data from a form or a URL, a web browser sends a request for information from a database or provides data to be added to the database.
2 WebSTAR receives this request and passes it to the WebSTAR Lasso Publisher Plug-In.
3 WebSTAR Lasso Publisher takes the request and connects with the database to perform the requested search or create the new record.
4 When the database has finished, Lasso gathers the results and formats them as HTML. This HTML is passed back to WebSTAR.
5 WebSTAR in turn takes the results and sends them to the browser where they are viewed as a web page.

While the above scenario is somewhat simplified and does not touch on the vast capabilities of WebSTAR Lasso Publisher, it should give you a basic sense of WebSTAR Lasso Publisher's role as web page to database interpreter.

WebSTAR Lasso Publisher vs. Lasso Web Data Engine

WebSTAR Lasso Publisher's features are a subset of Blue World Communications' Lasso Web Data Engine. Certain functions available in the Lasso Web Data Engine are not available in WebSTAR Lasso Publisher. The most prominent restrictions are listed below:

1 While WebSTAR Lasso Publisher can be used to add new records to a database and browse existing records, database records cannot be edited.
2 Records cannot be deleted from a database using WebSTAR Lasso Publisher .
3 Solutions that utilize the Lasso Java Application Programming Interface will not work with WebSTAR Lasso Publisher.
4 WebSTAR's realm-based security features must be used to control access to databases published with WebSTAR Lasso Publisher. The advanced security features available with the Lasso Web Data Engine are not available when using WebSTAR Lasso Publisher.
5 WebSTAR Lasso Publisher will only access three FileMaker Pro databases or one ODBC data source at any given session.
6 WebSTAR Lasso Publisher will only return the first 50 records in a found set.
7 WebSTAR Lasso Publisher supports a subset of the tags in Lasso Dynamic Markup Language (LDML).

For a complete list of the tags supported, open the LDML Reference Database and click the Lasso Publisher button.

The above restrictions are not imposed on the Lasso Web Data Engine, which is available directly from Blue World Communications at http://www.blueworld.com/ or StarNine's online store at http://store.starnine.com/ .

What You Need to Know

The remainder of this chapter deals with the technical aspects of invoking WebSTAR Lasso Publisher from forms and using Lasso Dynamic Markup Language (LDML) tags to format results. Before attempting to use WebSTAR Lasso Publisher, you should have a working knowledge of HTML, particularly HTML forms, understanding of what a WebSTAR Plug-In is, and understand how web pages are served by WebSTAR. If you are unsure of your skills in these areas, you will probably save yourself some frustration by honing those skills first then coming back to this chapter when you feel more confident.

HTML Editor Requirements

Some HTML editing programs may not be ideal for creating documents with LDML. LDML uses square brackets `[ ]' rather than the angle brackets `< >' used in HTML. If your HTML editor does not recognize LDML tags, it may encode the square brackets into character codes. While WebSTAR Lasso Publisher is able to interpret LDML tags even when the brackets have been encoded, it can make your documents difficult to edit.

If you're using a graphical HTML editor, you should use the included FM Link tool to author your tags and take advantage of LDML's "Alternative Syntax". When this option is selected, FM Link embeds substitution, process, container, and sub-container tags within <LDML tag=...> objects as follows:

<LDML tag="Lasso_tag_here">

In FM Link, the Alternate Syntax option can be toggled using the Drag menu or the command-Y key combination.