Posted by Andy Dingley on 10/25/07 09:45

On 23 Oct, 18:49, LetMeDoIt <powercode...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> The problem I'm having is I that when I enter a search string, I not
> sure how the button frame communicates with the details frame.

Trivial JavaScript, that access other frames through the DOM. You
might find examples of this by web searching, but most web JS code
libraries are abysmally poor quality. A posting to
comp.lang.javascript might give you some better practice.

On the whole though, throw away your frames and start again. If you're
not using JS, then frames have some advantages to offer (and a whole
load of disadvantages). Once you've accepted the use of JS though, you
can do a whole pile of different techniques that aren't based around
frames and let you avoid their problems. Some of these would use AJAX
(retrieving your datasets by XML or maybe JSON) others might use an
<iframe> rather than frames, and would allow you to use pretty much
the same HTML-serving web service endpoints you're already using. The
<iframe> solution is probably your best overall - given your current
starting point. <iframe>s are _not_ the same as frames, they don't
have the same disadvanatges as frames and by the use of JS as you
describe here, you can work around most of the disadvantages that they
do share with frames.

In particular, make sure that your finished solution is RESTful (look
it up on wikipedia). The practical requirement here would be that
there were stable URLs to the overall page that retrieved the same
data query each time, not just a single URL and a need for manual
tweaking of search boxes.


Flash is entirely inappropriate here. Poor old Travis, it's all he
knows.

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