Joseph W. Lowery
"Dreamweaver CS3 Bible"
Not only are the technical lines of communication
enabled, but any necessary translation services are also put into play. When you connect to a data
source in Dreamweaver, you??™re opening a channel between your Web pages and a designated data source.
(Notice that I??™m referring to lowercase data, not Data, the android; I??™ll save that extended metaphor for
another time.)
As noted earlier, you have numerous ways to connect to a data source. The simplest, DSN, requires some
administrative setup and has a negative impact on server performance. Alternatives, such as DSN-less and
OLE DB connections, require the developer to have more information on hand??”such as the exact location
of the data source on the server??”but are less server-intensive.
Regardless of the connection method you use, Dreamweaver handles them in basically the same fashion.
ColdFusion is the only language that??™s handled differently, either by linking to the data source directly
through the DSN in the CFQUERY tag or through a Data Source Name Variable in the Application.cfm
file. After you define a connection, as detailed in the following sections, a server-side include is inserted into
your document above the opening tag, like this one for ASP: