I'm an experienced developer but a NetObjects Fusion newbie. I have taken on work for a friend that presents me with an opportunity to learn something new working with NetObjects Fusion 12.0. I have spent a number of hours working through the NetObjects interface learning how to create pages. Admittedly I have not worked my way through the entire manual, but I am starting to think I might understand the framework model and how it could be used to duplicate the functionality below. What I'd like to do is confirm the inkling I have of the way to go before I spend significantly more time running down what may be a less-than-efficient approach or even a dead-end.
The design pattern, were I implementing it in a framework I am familiar with would be something like this: The initial html page presents a text box on a form. The user inputs text and clicks the submit button to submit the form. An external program (java or php) is invoked which pulls the POST value submitted by the user and does a lookup on a table. The code/script then does its work manipulating data it creates based on values in the table. When done it places the value in a data object in memory and passes control to a template processor (java or php). The template processor reads an html template and substitutes values from the data object into the appropriate places in the html template and returns the completed html page to the user's browser. I have years of professional experience working with this approach and I understand it well. The following description is what I think I need to do to implement the same user experience within the Fusion model. I would appreciate it very much if someone would provide some confirmation or alternative approaches or point me in a better direction.
Creating the html text input, submit button and form in Fusion is easy as is controlling the page flow to the Results Page. I managed to stumble my way into getting a FormHandler.php script to run when the submit button is clicked and I can see it contains the expected POST data (using Eclipse PDT on a Zend/Apache development box I set up). I will want to use the form handler script to do the lookup on the table and manipulate the data to create the elements I want to display on the Results Page. However, what I think I need to do is place these elements in another table so the Results Page can be set up with a Data Source object that will draw from this new table. Have I got this right? Is there a better way?
Another question: Given that the "new table" will have rows from multiple users' sessions. What is the best way to limit the rows to the specific user? I know how I would do it in my usual framework, but I haven't been through the manual section that describes that yet. I would guess that the Data Source object on the Results Page is created with a filter based on a specific value associated with the user. However, I'm not sure how the Results Page knows about the user connected with it. In other words, what is the mechanism by which the Results Page can have a variable that will allow the DataSource object to apply a value as a filter?
I appreciate any and all input. Thanks.