Using Visual FoxPro to Generate Data-centric Web Pages - Choosing a presentation style
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This brings you to Step. 3 of web page generation shown in Fig.12. Presentation is the key to a pleasant user experience. There are lots of built-in styles and data layout decorations that can be chosen. You may choose ones that are similar to those I've chosen here. When you click next, you come to the last step, Step.4.
Fig.12 
Step. 4 has a few options that you can choose as shown in Fig.13. You can give a title to the web page, but this will only go between <Title></Title> of the web page. However, if you elect to edit the page you can add custom text to the page. Here the first option has been taken. When the Finish button is clicked a web page with the same name as the table, namely orders.htm, is created in the default directory.
Fig.13
Displaying the web page created
Fig.14 shows a part of the orders.htm as seen in a browser. It comes ready with navigational features and a pleasing background. You can step through the records and the chosen fields are shown in the right hand pane. In the background, Visual FoxPro has created several other auxiliary htm pages to make this navigation possible. All these pages are held together in a frame set as seen in the following source code for orders.htm. The orders_0.htm, orders_1.htm, and orders_2.htm are also saved to the default directory.
Fig.14 
<head>
<title>
Orders from MS Access
</title>
</head>
<frameset rows="80,*">
<frame name="frame0" id="frame0" frameborder=0 src=orders_0.HTM>
<frameset cols="20%,*">
<frame name="frame1" id="frame1" frameborder=0
src=orders_1.HTM>
<frame name="frame2" id="frame2" frameborder=0
src=orders_2.HTM>
</frameset>
</frameset>
</html>
Summary
Visual FoxPro makes it very easy to create a web page even better than Data Access Pages, a technology that came with Access 2000. The web page creation feature was present in Visual FoxPro from much earlier times. When I was consulting with WorldCom, someone there once told me that it was the ease with which the data was made available as a web page that made them choose this software. With the added editable options available it is very easy to create a custom look and feel for the reports.
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