How to Build and Debug ADPs

1. Create an HTML page. Use an HTML editor, such as AOLpress, or a file editor to create an HTML page. Be sure to either name the file with the correct extension or save it in the correct directory on your server as specified by the Map parameter setting.

   If you plan to use the Tcl script to return part or all of the page's content, just omit that part of the page, but you can create all of the surrounding HTML.

2. Add your Tcl scripts with a file editor. Insert your Tcl scripts in the page where you want them to be processed. Be sure to enclose each Tcl script using one of the <script> or <% ...%> syntaxes (see page 13). Save the HTML page.

3. View the HTML page in a browser. Visit the page you have created in a browser to see if the Tcl scripts work correctly. You can turn on client debugging (see page 9) if you want to see what went wrong with your Tcl scripts.

4. Continue editing and viewing until it works correctly. Continue editing the page in a file editor, saving it, and refreshing it in a browser until it works the way you want it to.

Note on Editing ADPs with AOLpress:

Using AOLpress to edit your ADPs is not recommended, for the reasons listed below. Other HTML editors may behave differently.

• When you view a page in AOLpress, the Tcl script has already been processed, and the underlying HTML is the HTML that was generated with your script, not the script itself. So, if you edit the page and save it, you will have saved only the HTML that resulted from the processing of the embedded Tcl scripts, and the scripts themselves will be lost.

• If you view the HTML source and edit your Tcl scripts there, you will receive an error if you try to save the HTML source, because the ADP syntax used to embed Tcl scripts is not recognized by AOLpress.