Understanding the Process

Each time a page is requested from a WorkflowFirst application, it first generates data structures containing the raw information that is used on the screen. This contains the record being viewed, but also includes things like the list of actions and reports relevant to the record, the navigator content that shows where you are, the 'goto' list and so on. All of these are in raw data structures.

You can view these structures by appending '&xml=true' to the end of any URL for accessing WorkflowFirst. This will return an XML representation of the raw data structures, telling WorkflowFirst to bypass the remaining steps.

In the next step, the application loads the appropriate template file. This is an HTML text file that contains special markup that says how it utilizes that data to format it in a way that is appropriate to display on the screen.

Finally, it merges together the raw data structures and the template file, to create an HTML file that can be sent back to the user for displaying in their web-browser.

This three- step process happens automatically every time you request a page. 

By default the main page template that is loaded is called 'dbf.htm', and this is held in the 'Files' subfolder of the application. 

However, if a different platform is selected, then a different template file is loaded. The name of the template is based on the name of the platform and the type of template. If you have an alternative for the “dbf.htm” file, and the platform is called, for example, 'Silverlight', then the file will be called p_silverlight_dbf.htm. Every platform file is prefixed with 'p_', followed by the name of the platform, and then an underscore and the name of the template file.


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