ActiveContent

Active Content

Active content is content that is dynamic. It includes program code of some sort for computing data or presentation at run time. Examples of active content include:

• ZPT and DTML templates
• Python scripts
• SQL scripts

Active content is only reused as content. For example, a Python script might be used by several other active content objects but it is not applied or "bound" to different objects as a method.

When executed, active content has access to it's container and to the request. It can be acquired, but it has no access to the object that acquired it. For example, suppose we have a script, summary.py, in the root folder and we acquire the script in a tempate three folders down from the root folder. In this case, the script has access to a container variable that is the root folder. It has no way of accessing the folder it was acquired in unless the folder is passed as an argument to the script.