Testing the project installation

For convenience, we will test in two stages. First, we check that Arcos is working correctly by creating the simplest of web sites — a single web page. Then in the next topic we check that the integration between Arcos and the database works.

We will create the configuration file and a simple template. Arcos will use the template to generate a page that is displayed in a browser.

To test the project installation

  1. Using a text editor of your choice, create the configuration file called configuration.1.xml in the /config directory. The file should contain the following XML (explained later):
    <Configuration>
       <Page PageName="welcome">
          <SYS_Display_Template TemplateFile="LOCAL_welcome"/>
       </Page>
    </Configuration>
    
  2. Create a template file called welcome.html in the /config/template directory. The file should contain the following HTML:
    <HTML>
      <BODY>
        <H1>Hello World!</H1>
      </BODY>
    </HTML>
    
  3. Open a browser and type the URL of the welcome.html file. The URL consists of the base URL followed by the file name (you do not need to type the .html extension).
  4. The page should appear. If it does not, or if any error messages appear, refer to the "Troubleshooting" topic.

Explanation of configuration.1.xml

<Configuration>

Each configuration file must start with this tag.

<Page PageName="welcome">

This tells Arcos that we want it to generate a web page with the name welcome.html. We do not need to add the .html extension.

For a full explanation of all Page the properties, see Page built-in tag.

<SYS_Display_Template TemplateFile="LOCAL_welcome"/>

This tells Arcos which template to use. The template file is specified in two parts:
LOCAL_   This indicates that the template resides in the /config/template directory.
welcome   This is the name of the template. In this case, the template and the name of the page are the same. This not strictly necessary, but for clarity, we recommend that you follow this convention wherever possible.

Arcos uses strict nesting. This SYS_Display_Template tag does not have a closing tag, therefore, at the end of the line there is />. (Compare this to tags such as Configuration, which have a corresponding closing tag.)

</Page> and </Configuration>

Closing tags.