User-Defined Pages and Data Sources

In Web Designer, you can define relationships between data sources for which NO conceptual parent-child relationship has been defined. This makes it possible to define your own related pages and lookup pages. Web Designer synchronizes parent and child data in the same way as for conceptual parent-child relationships.

There are several ways to work with user-defined related pages and data sources:

·	You can define a new related page that is based on the table containing the related data. This page initially contains no TableDataSource, so you will have to add a TableDataSource with a Relate object and all fields to display.

The new related page can be called from, or embedded in other pages.

The main advantage: possible re-use of this new page. A disadvantage is that a bit more work is involved.

·	You can define a new data source object that is based on the table containing the related data. Now you only have to add a Relate object, and you can re-use this data source in other pages.

The new related TableDataSource object is included in all pages where you need it.

The main advantage: possible re-use of this (conceptual) data source object. There is not really a disadvantage here.

·	You can identify one target page, in which you include all necessary objects and fields.

The main advantage is: all definitions are available in one page. The disadvantage: no re-use.

Of course, different situations ask for different solutions, but as a guideline, we advise to define (conceptual) data source objects first. This is the second option above.

All examples in this section follow this guideline.