PicLan-IP Dynamic Web Content

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1. Server-Side Includes

The PicLan-IP web server supports supports server-side includes. A server-side include allows you to include one HTML page's code inside of another by simply referring to the directory path. You do so by using the following HTML syntax:

{INCLUDE /path/file.HTM}

If you wish to include a file with a path relative to the current file, you can specify it as:

{INCLUDE file.HTM}

In either case, the results of the included HTML page from the <body> tag through the </body> tag will be inserted verbatum into the current document.

Because of the nature of HTML, you can only include whole paragraphs.

The intent of the server-side include functions is to allow you to re-use common components that appear in many documents. Examples of these would be common headers and footers.

You may also nest includes (one document may include another) to any reasonable depth, but be careful not to create endless loops.

Active Pages as Includes

It is possible to use PicLan-IP active server pages (pages that contain embedded MV/Basic code) as a part of the included page. In this case, the active code is executed when the page is first accessed and the results are stored as a part of the composite page. The active code is not re-executed every time that the page is hit.

The intent of active server-side includes is to allow smart-includes. For example, the header and footer for this page includes an active server-side include that builds the line of links from chapter to chapter. A single include document is build with embedded MV/Basic source code that looks at the current document name and builds the link fields based on where it is being included from.
To get the current document name in an include, you use the following MV/Basic statement:

PL_GETVAR X FROM 'SRC' ELSE X = ''

This statement will return a dynamic array of attributes of all of the included page names.

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