Web mode applications are developed like any regular WorkflowFirst application. As you develop your application, you can add HTML pages to a special type of custom view. These will be the pages that visitors to your site will see.

The great thing about developing websites this way is that it's easy to populate all the data before you start. Creating web sites without any content is far more difficult. WorkflowFirst makes it much easier by giving you a full alternative, database-style interface that lets you easily populate the data before you start creating the HTML pages.

Note: Once you enable the 'Primarily Web Mode' setting, you must be logged in as an administrator to access the regular WorkflowFirst data view of your application. An attempt to access those pages when not an administrator will result in an error page being displayed. Both the system administrator (defined in the application record) or any user with 'Is Admin' set to 'Yes' will be able to access the regular WorkflowFirst interface.

Custom views are discussed in more detail in the section on custom views. Basically, you provide HTML files that contain markup. In that markup you can insert DbfScript commands, and these run on the server to retrieve and manipulate data, and convert these into values as part of the HTML. Only parts of the HTML contain these commands, wherever you need to retrieve data.

As a good rule of thumb, we add one top level type called 'General' that is used as the home page record. This record can contain messages that appear on the home page, and provide a good starting place for your web site. You can then make the 'General' tab the startup tab by specifying it in the Application record. Whatever is in the startup tab will define which page will be displayed by default on your website.

Talking of the default page: in order for your application to show a web site instead of the regular database-type view, you will need to set the 'Primarily Web Mode' to 'Yes' on the application record. This means that when the default.aspx page is accessed, it will show the startup view's web mode custom view by default.