Data Source catalog

FrontPage 2003 lets you easily insert data views into your Web page. The catalog contains data sources that are already part of your Web site— such as lists in Web sites based on Windows SharePoint Services and any XML files in the Web site— and it allows you to configure any other data sources that you want to work with in WYSIWYG format. Supported data sources include:

• Windows SharePoint Services data
• XML files
• Web services or URLs that return XML
• OLE DB data sources

Data Source Details view

The Data Source Details view in FrontPage 2003 allows you to see the data structure of a data source and even walk through individual records. If you are unfamiliar with the data source, you can see its structure and contents before inserting a view into a page.

Web Part pages and zones

With the Web Parts task pane, you can add one or more Web Parts to a page. When you connect Web Parts, changes to data or formatting in one Web Part are reflected in the others. This allows you to create sophisticated master detail views of your data, where the site visitor can select categories from one Web Part and see the details for that category in another. You can also define Web Part zones that site visitors can add Web Parts to by using a Web browser.

Data View Web Part

You can use the Data View Web Part to author data views on live data, directly in FrontPage 2003 Design view. When you insert a data view, you are actually adding a Data View Web Part to your page. This Web Part is transparent in both Design and Code views and looks just like regular FrontPage content, but you can manipulate the data in a new, WYSIWIG way. You can format the data by using the standard formatting tools. This formatting is automatically applied to all of the data points at the same level of the XML tree (or in that column of the database). No special controls are required to format the data. You simply select the text and apply formatting just as you would format regular HTML text.

When you format your data, FrontPage authors an Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) to apply that formatting to your page. The XSLT is presented directly inline in the HTML file and can be edited in the Code or Split views in FrontPage 2003.

Customized Data Views

In FrontPage 2003, you can quickly change the overall look of data— either by manually formatting the data or by applying a prebuilt Data View style. Applying a style preserves any applicable manual formatting you have already done, and you can apply additional manual formatting after you specify the style. You can also customize the Data View to suit your needs.

FrontPage helps you to package Web solutions and distribute and share them with others. You can use the Web Packages template to package a portion of your Web site based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services into a module that others can add to their sites. For example, you can package a service solution that is specific to a certain type of business. You can then convert that functionality into a convenient single file format (a cabinet file with an .fwp file name extension).

When you export or import Web packages from Web sites based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, FrontPage 2003 makes sure that all dependent files are included, so the deployed package works seamlessly on the new Web site.

You can use Extensible Markup Language (XML) to complement, rather than replace, your use of HTML. You can view or edit files, apply standard formatting to the structure of code in XML files, view the XML structure, and create custom displays of XML data on Web pages. For example, you can use FrontPage to create a Web page that displays data from an XML file, and then you can apply filtering, sorting, and conditional formatting to display the data the way you want.