Frames question...

[Griff]

A novice's view-point (please correct)

With CLASSIC ASP, I understand that frames could be beneficial. For
example, the left-hand frame could contain the ASP for the navigation tool
and the right-hand frame would contain the main page. I believe that the
advantage was that all the ASP (and database accesses) required to create
the navigation tool would only have to be run once. The alternative of
having the navigation tool in the same page was that every time the page
loaded, the navigation tool would have to be re-loaded too.

My understanding with ASP.NET is that the page knows if the page is being
posted back on therefore only has to load the navigation tool when it's
first loaded.

My question therefore is are there any advantages in using a multi-framed
page instead of a single page?

Thanks

Griff

 

[Kikoz]

Hi Griff.

Frames have been discussed in this group numerous times.

Again Each frame, wether it's nav, or content, or header, or whatever,
would contain (in simple scenarios) a separate aspx page. Each of those aspx
pages has its own life cycle and would not be aware of eachother, i.e. you
post one of them and others have no idea of what just happened. So, unless
you create somewhat complicated client scripts that would deal with it, it's
worthless.

Typically, developers use frames to make nav and/or header to stay in one
place while content can be scrolled up and down (that's the only advantage
of using frames I can think of). Well, I don't know any single person who
would tell me that he stopped using some web site because the site doesn't
use frames It's silly, really.

ASP.NET gives you a great tools to deal with this stuff if you agree that
scrolling is not that bad. Use UserControl(s) for navigation and /or header
(ascx files). You load them ones and they keep their state through ViewState
for all futher postbacks. ASP.NET 2.0 will have Master Pages (I believe this
idea has been stolen from Dreamweaver ) which will give you even more
flexibility and control. Or build your own ServerControl(s) which you can
reuse on other sites you develop. They can be as complex as you want.

Hope this helps,
Kikoz

 

[Griff]

Hope this helps,

Kikoz

It certainly does. Many thanks!

Griff