nce upon a time I wanted to go berserk and burn down Adobe’s headquarters because I was so frustrated with Dreamweaver. For anyone who doesn’t know (I don’t know why you would be reading this if you didn’t, but anyway), Dreamweaver is a web development tool. It is an application that lets you design a web page graphically, and writes the html and scripting for you in the background. It’s designed to allow people who don’t care to know much about the guts of web development to make better, more dynamic web pages than they would be able to otherwise. The conundrum is this: In order to do anything really useful with Dreamweaver, you have to learn to understand the code in the background. So, by the time you learn what all the code means, you don’t need Dreamweaver any more. They’ve priced themselves right out of the business, much like the unions.
I write PHP in notepad for my own stuff, but recently I was forced to use Dreamweaver as part of a class. The setup was this: Design and build a database in Oracle to solve a client’s business problem, then create a web frontend using Dreamweaver JSP and Tomcat to demo the database to the professor.
The first problem I hit was getting Dreamweaver to recognize my stored procedures. Dreamweaver could browse my tables fine, but displayed “none” whenever I tried to browse stored procedures. This put a grinding halt to the project since the functionality of the proposed system was based on stored procedures working. I finally found a simple setting that fixed the issue. Apparently, if your Oracle system is set up with several different schemas, Dreamweaver needs to know that. In our case, there was a schema set up for each project group in the class. Hopefully this will work for you:
- Open your JSP file in Dreamweaver
- Expand the “Application” panel on the right
- Choose the “Database” tab (you should see your database connection already setup here)
- Right click on your database connection and choose “Edit Connection”
- Click “Advanced”
- Enter your schema name in “Schema” and OK out of all windows.
The second problem I hit was figuring out how to call a stored procedure from a web page. Dreamweaver doesn’t have any fancy wizards for that task. A how-to about that is way too complex for me to write now, I’m tired. So here are some pointers instead:
- In Dreamweaver JSP, stored procedures are called Callables. Create them from the Bindings tab in the Applications panel.
- The Callable dialog box (and Tomcat) is not very helpful in troubleshooting errors. Make sure your “Run-time Value” parameters match exactly to the names of your form elements that are passing the values into the stored procedures
- Dreamweaver creates the Callable so that it runs first thing on the page. If you don’t want it to run when the page first loads, you need to put an if statement that checks for form data around the “Callable1.execute” statement in your code. Mine looks like this:
if(request.getParameter(“CheckNum”) != null){ Callable1.execute();}
And they all lived happily ever after. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Technical Bedtime Stories 