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Building an InternetExpress Application
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The following steps describe one way to build a Web application using InternetExpress. The result is an application that creates HTML pages that let users interact with the data from an application server via a javascript-enabled Web browser. You can also build an InternetExpress application using the Site Express architecture by using the InternetExpress page producer (TInetXPageProducer).

To build a Web application using InternetExpress

1. Choose FileNewOther to display the New Items dialog box, and on the New page select Web Server application. This process is described in Creating Web server applications with Web Broker.
2. From the DataSnap category of the Tool palette, add a connection component to the Web Module that appears when you create a new Web server application. The type of connection component you add depends on the communication protocol you want to use. See Choosing a connection protocol for details.
3. Set properties on your connection component to specify the application server with which it should establish a connection. To learn more about setting up the connection component, see Connecting to the application server.
4. Instead of a client dataset, add an TXMLBroker from the InternetExpress category of the Tool palette to the Web module. Like TClientDataSet, TXMLBroker represents the data from a provider on the application server and interacts with the application server through an IAppServer interface. However, unlike client datasets, XML brokers request data packets as XML instead of as OleVariants and interact with InternetExpress components instead of data controls.
5. Set the RemoteServer property of the XML broker to point to the connection component you added in step 2. Set the ProviderName property to indicate the provider on the application server that provides data and applies updates. For more information about setting up the XML broker, see Using an XML broker.
6. Add an InternetExpress page producer (TInetXPageProducer) to the Web module for each separate page that users will see in their browsers. For each page producer, you must set the IncludePathURL property to indicate where it can find the javascript libraries that augment its generated HTML controls with data management capabilities.
7. Right-click a Web page and choose Action Editor to display the Action editor. Add action items for every message you want to handle from browsers. Associate the page producers you added in step 6 with these actions by setting their Producer property or writing code in an OnAction event handler. For more information on adding action items using the Action editor, see Adding actions to the dispatcher.
8. Double-click each Web page to display the Web Page editor. (You can also display this editor by clicking the ellipsis button in the Object Inspector next to the WebPageItems property.) In this editor you can add Web Items to design the pages that users see in their browsers. For more information about designing Web pages for your InternetExpress application, see Creating Web pages with an InternetExpress page producer.
9. Build your Web application. Once you install this application with your Web server, browsers can call it by specifying the name of the application as the script name portion of the URL and the name of the Web Page component as the pathinfo portion.

See Also

Granting Permission to Access and Launch the Application Server

Creating the Application Server

Using the Javascript Libraries

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