Theories
A while back, when I started designing the Web Site Content Management Framework (codenamed Trinity), I was writing a bit of code as a proof of concept. This code enabled the casual content contributor to include a field within their content that at runtime would be replaced with some value from a data source.

For example: Suppose I have the following bit of content

Welcome to the home of <# author.fullname #>.  Here you will
find all of the articles written by <# author.firstname #>.

Ok, so we have a generic bit of content that is stored somewhere that also includes dynamic content. That is, content that changes according to some variable. At runtime, the system would replace the <# #> fields with the actual values from the data source so that you would see:

Welcome to the home of Bryan Daneman.  Here you will find all of
the articles written by Bryan.

Easy? It should be. My initial approach was to simply look for a specific delimiter within the data fields, interprate what data was needed and then insert that data in place of the delimiter, etc.

Now, I am thinking that this might be done better using some sort of transformation. In other words, generate the page, along with all of the dynamic data, then transform the page, via XSL, so that the "placeholder" fields in the content get the actual data values.

Anyway, enough rambling. Time to write some code.

Posted by Bryan Daneman on 12/3/2001 1:05:24 PM