At a Glance

During Week 2, you create one of the most common applications found on the Web-a shopping cart application. It consists of one custom form class, eight JavaScript forms, one JavaScript report, six dBASE tables, two images, and a header file. You learn a lot about JavaScript, performance, and getting forms to look good in a browser.

The week starts off with a day of investigation, design, and setup. During Day 8, you don't do much with IntraBuilder itself. Instead, you examine several Web stores and break down the functionality into components that you will tackle in the following days. Day 8 also includes an introduction to the Navigator Gold HTML editor.

You really start building the application on Day 9. Here you create a custom form class that establishes the look and feel for all other forms. The first standard form is the Help form. The major JavaScript concept of the day is exception handling.

The primary and most complex function of the shopping cart application is giving shoppers the ability to search for items quickly and easily. On Day 10, you take time out of the application development to examine some of the built-in capabilities such as query by form. The day's lesson also includes an extensive series of benchmarks that show the effects of using indexes and changing table types.

Day 11 brings together some of the performance features uncovered during the previous day to create a quick search form. While creating the quick search form, you learn techniques for sharing information between forms. Day 11's lesson also shows how to create a read-only form for viewing the results of a query.

The focus of Day 12 is the creation of a multiple row grid control. Although neither IntraBuilder nor HTML provides a built-in control for working with an array of values, JavaScript makes it easy to create your own dynamic grid.

On Day 13, you return to the subject of searching and learn how to create complex searches. IntraBuilder allows for simple searches through SQL expressions and complex searches through database events. The quick search form relies on SQL expressions. The form you create on Day 13 takes advantage of database events.

The week ends with the development of the only form in the application to use standard datalinks that directly update a table. The final form also takes advantage of form pages for data validation on mimicking modal behavior. The last task on the last day is the creation of a report that uses events to calculate totals.

You are encouraged to go through each day and build up to the complete application, but you can also jump to any day using the example files provided. You can find day-by-day iterations of forms, reports, scripts, images, and header files in separate example folders. All the days require the same set of tables. The tables are in a separate tables folder. To get the examples for any day, copy all the files for that day and all the files from the tables folder to your working folder.