I love Microsoft Expressions, but every once in a while, I want to beat my computer to a pulp. Why I want to blame the computer for something a program isn’t doing correctly is beyond me, but the irrational side can often take over during frustrating moments! Today’s dilemma comes from the inability to update all pages in a sub-web folder from a dynamic web template (DWT). In actuality, the situation I found myself in was a little different then that… so let me explain using this note to self you exactly what happened, and how if you find yourself in my shoes you can work around the issue.
The initial website was created using FrontPage 2003. When a hard-drive failure occurred on my old computer, I uploaded the full website from the online version. Having upgraded on the new computer to Microsoft Expressions I converted to a Web Folder the existing folder I had just uploaded the site to. At that time, any change to the dynamic web template was reflected on all attached pages to that template. A problem arose only when I needed to make a sub-folder for the site into a sub-web folder. Each of the folders had its own template already… so this should have been a breeze to do. The folders just weren’t setup to be their own web folder. I converted the sub-folder into a web-folder and attempted to update the template. No changes were made to the existing pages. I tried updating ALL pages with the new template, that also failed to change the pages to the new template. Attempting to detach and then attach the template was disastrous, as Microsoft Expressions deleted all of the markup language used to identify a region within the page. I then tried creating a new page and attaching the template to the page and that worked fine. Making an additional change to the DWT resulted in changes to the 1 page considered attached.
The workaround? I found out I was able to select multiple pages and change the selected pages using:
Select the pages you wish to update from the folder list.
Click on Format, then select Dynamic Web Template and click on “Update Selected Page.” Presto… the selected pages are updated. Interestingly, you can select all of the pages using this method and they’ll update, but the option to update all pages failed to work.