Participant files

A participant represents a single code block on the page, such as a server tag, an HTML tag, or an attribute. A participant file must be listed in a group file to be available to a Adobe Dreamweaver document author. Several group files can use a single participant file.

For example, the moveTo_declareParam.edml file contains the following code:

<participant> <quickSearch><![CDATA[MM_paramName]]></quickSearch> <insertText location="aboveHTML+80"><![CDATA[<% var MM_paramName = ""; %>]]> </insertText> <searchPatterns whereToSearch="directive"> <searchPattern><![CDATA[/var\s*MM_paramName/]]></searchPattern> </searchPatterns></participant>

When Adobe Dreamweaver adds a server behavior to a document, it needs to have detailed information, including where to insert the code, what the code looks like, and what parameters the Adobe Dreamweaver author or data replaced at runtime. Each participant EDML file describes these details for each block of code. Specifically, the participant file describes the following data:

  • The code and where to put the unique instance are defined by the insertText tag parameters, as shown in the following example:
    <insertText location="aboveHTML+80">
  • How to recognize instances already on the page are defined by the searchPatterns tag, as shown in the following example:
    <searchPatterns whereToSearch="directive"> <searchPattern><![CDATA[/var\s*MM_paramName/]]></searchPattern></searchPatterns>

In the searchPatterns block tag, each searchPattern tag contains a pattern that finds instances of runtime code and extracts specific parameters. For more details, see .