 | ||||
|
|
| Mercury - Build Lightweight Web Menu Buttons And Tabs In Minutes
8.1 Uploading Menus After purchasing Mercury, you'll want to implement a menu in your web pages. Before we explain how to do this, we'll discuss a few key concepts. How Mercury Menus Work The Mercury menu is a Java applet. It a pre-compiled component that holds all the programmatic code required to operate your menu. This is held in a file called 'WibbleMercury.class'. When you purchase Mercury, you'll receive a new installation that contains a licensed version of this file. The 'WibbleMercury.class' file needs to be uploaded to your web server. When a visitor views one of your pages, the 'WibbleMercury.class' file on your web server is downloaded and run on their PC (this all happens invisibly to the user - as long as they have Java installed). It uses the parameter information you've provided in your web page script to figure out the style of the buttons, which menu items to list, and where the URL links should point to. The 'WibbleMercury.class' file is located in the 'C:\Program Files\Wibbleware\Mercury\' folder on your hard drive. We'd recommend uploading the file into the root web folder on your web server. Other Files Require Uploading Of course, in addition to all these files, you'll also need to upload the web file you've created containing the applet script. Examples We'll step through a few scenarios and detail where the files could be placed and the effect it has on the web page script. For our examples, we'll our main web page is called 'main.htm' and a secondary page is called 'secondary.htm'. To keep the focus on specifi elements here, in the script examples we'll only display the <applet> tags and menu parameters. Scenario #1 The easiest (but messiest) thing to do is to simply copy all your files up into your public HTML folder on your web server. If you did this, the folder would contain the following: /Public_HTML WibbleMercury.class main.htm secondary.htm The 'main.htm' and 'secondary.htm' web files would both contain the following script to invoke the Mercury menu:
As mentioned, this is simple but a little messy. Generally, files are grouped into different folders for ease of maintenance. Scenario #2 For our second scenario, imagine that the web pages are located in different folders. We'll create a 'misc' folder and place the 'secondary.htm' file into it: /Public_HTML WibbleMercury.class main.htm /Public_HTML/misc secondary.htm This has an effect on the script for the menu. The main.htm script needs to be changed to reference the 'misc' folder when linking to the 'secondary.htm' page:
However, a change also needs to be made to the 'secondary.htm' script. When it tries to invoke the Mercury menu, it is now no longer in the same folder as the 'WibbleMercury.class' file. It needs to use the special 'CODEBASE' applet property to refer to the previous folder to fully specify where the 'WibbleMercury.class' file is. It uses the standard relative addressing value of '../' to step back to the previous folder:
One important thing to notice here is that the menu URLs do not change, even though the 'secondary.htm' file has been moved into another folder. This is because the menu URLs are based on the location of the 'WibbleMercury.class' file, not the web page. 8.2 Case-Sensitivity You should be aware that URL references are generally case-sensitive on UNIX-based platforms. So, for instance, the URL 'main.htm' would not load a page called 'MAIN.htm'. To complicate matters, Windows does not make this distinction. So, projects that work fine on local drives may suddenly fail when uploaded to your web server. So, always double-check your URL references carefully!
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| [Home] [Products] [Downloads] [Support] [Articles] [About] support@wibbleware.com © Wibbleware 2003-2009 Privacy Policy [Java™ Trademark Disclaimer] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
