Oracle WebServer User's Guide

CHAPTER 6. Oracle WebServer Developer's Toolkit

This chapter describes the hypertext procedures, hypertext functions, and utilities that make up the Oracle WebServer Developer's Toolkit.

One of the main goals of the Oracle Web Agent is to eliminate the PL/SQL programmer's need to be intimately familiar with World Wide Web technology. To this end, the Oracle WebServer includes a Developer's Toolkit made up of several PL/SQL packages that minimize the programmer's need to know HTML syntax. Although the programmer is still required to have a working knowledge of HTML, by using the Toolkit he or she will not need to hard code the exact syntax of HTML tags into PL/SQL procedures. For instance, a programmer still needs to realize that an anchor tag is needed, but he or she doesn't need to know the exact sequence of characters needed to generate an anchor.

The Oracle WebServer Developer's Toolkit includes the following PL/SQL Packages:

Hypertext Procedures (HTP)

A hypertext procedure generates a line in an HTML document that contains the HTML tag that corresponds to its name. For instance, the htp.anchor procedure generates an anchor tag. The HTP package will be the most commonly used package of the three.

Hypertext Functions (HTF)

A hypertext function returns the HTML tag that corresponds to its name. However, it is not sufficient to call an HTF function on its own because the HTML tag is not passed to the Web Agent. The output of an HTF function must be passed to htp.print in order to actually be part of an HTML document. Thus, the following line:

	htp.print(htf.italic('Title'));

is functionally equivalent to:

	htp.italic('Title');

Every hypertext function (HTF) has a corresponding hypertext procedure (HTP). Thus, HTF functions are generally used only when the programmer needs to nest calls, such as:

	htp.header(1,htf.italic('Title'));

In this example, 'htf.italic' will generate the following character string:

	<I>Title</I>

This string is then passed to the 'htp.header' procedure and the following line will appear in the HTML document being formatted:

	<H1><I>Title</I></H1>

OWA Utilities (OWA_UTIL)

A collection of useful utility procedures and functions. The purposes of these range from printing a signature tag on HTML pages to easy formatting of Oracle tables into HTML.

OWA

A set of procedures called only by the Oracle Web Agent itself. None of the subprograms in this package should be called directly from user-developed PL/SQL.