Data-Driven Web Sites with FrontPage

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) provides the infrastructure for data-driven Web sites created with FrontPage 2003. Shown here is a site that presents an HTML page generated from time/attendance data in a human resources Web service, and an XML document created with an Office 2003 application such as Word.

WSS ships with a set of adapters that connect to a variety of sources and transforms the data from those sources into XML, which Web pages can then access through its Data Retrieval Services layer. The illustration shows the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) adapter, which WSS uses to connect to Web Services; the XML URL adapter, which connects to XML files such as those generated by Office Applications; and the OLEDB adapter, which connects to OLE DB–compliant databases such as SQL Server.

The HTML sent to a site visitor is generated by a Web Parts page. A Web Parts page is an ASP.NET (.aspx) dynamic Web page that includes Web Parts, reusable, interactive server-side Web page components that can consume and display live data. The page shown here uses two instances of the Data View Web Part, which generates HTML views of XML data, using a style sheet (in the XSLT style-sheet language) provided by a developer. When a site visitor navigates to the Web Parts page, the two Data View Web Parts query their data sources and dynamically generate HTML page sections. WSS combines these sections into the appropriate areas of the Web Parts page and returns a completed page to the visitor’s browser.