The architecture specifies that the rendering of the XML into HTML will be performed by Microsoft IIS/ASP.

This month we'll be taking an overview of that process.

The times are a changing
Why use Microsoft IIS/ASP for rendering? Why not use Lotus Domino itself?

That's a good question, and the answer is largely historical. When I first specified the architecture for the system, it was clear that Lotus Domino did a great job of writing out XML, but it wasn't nearly so good at reading and processing XML. In my opinion Microsoft IIS/ASP was a much better tool for the job, and wanting to make life as easy as possible for myself and for the development team, that's the decision that was made.

In 2002 the answer would be different. Today there's a wide range of choices for rendering XML into HTML using Lotus Domino, Microsoft IIS/ASP, WebSphere, PHP, Kylix, C++, XSL, or really just about any platform, language, or technology you care to name. These days everything renders XML.

In 2002 the logical choice would be to use Lotus Domino to do the HTML rendering as well as the content management administration because many clients will want to use a single server technology to implement their content management system.

Objectives of the HTML display template
So what is it that we want the HTML display template to achieve?

Here are the key objectives:

• The page must look slick and professional;

• For simplicity, there must be only one type of page in the entire content management system;

• The page layout must change dynamically according to whether or not there is content present in the underlying fields/XML data structures;

• The page must use the global site configuration options where specified, otherwise it should use options specified at the page level.

The ingredients: what do we have to work with?
To display a finished HTML page we need the following components, each of which is available via the XML API, except for the images (more on the images later). The components are:

• The content of the current page (XMLContent);

• The images for the current page;

• The global site configuration information (XMLSiteConfiguration);

• The text properties scheme specified for the current page (XMLTextProperties);

• Any site indexes that have been specified for the current page (XMLsIndex...);

• The site menu (XMLMainMenu).

Putting it all together
To put it all together, follow these steps.

Step one: work out which page to display
All we need to start displaying a page is a starting point--something to identify which document to display. The best way to identify a document is to use Domino's UNID (unique identifier), which is a 32 character hexadecimal number contained within every Lotus Notes and Domino document. The UNID must be passed as a parameter to the ASP page, or, if there's no parameter, we'll display the homepage for the site. The UNID for the homepage is stored within the site configuration XML structure that can be obtained via the (XMLSiteConfiguration) XML API call.