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window.onload

</object>

Lastly, if the file in question uses the first row as headers, you should set the

UseHeader

parameter to

true

, which doesn’t include the first row in the data values and also enables you to reference columns

by name as well as position:

</object>

This code says to load the tabular data control with the data in

Names.txt

that has a field delimiter of

“,”

and use the headers as a key for each column.

Here’s a sample

Names.txt

file:

first_name,last_name

Nicholas,Zakas

Michael,Smith

Joyce,Anderson

Benjamin,Johnson

Amy,Jones

The first column is named

first_name

, and the second column is named

last_name

. On each row,

commas, as indicated by using the

FieldDelim

parameter, separate the values.

The page’s

load

event does not fire until the tabular data control has fully loaded its data, so it’s safe to

use the

onload

event handler to determine when the data is available. At that point, you retrieve the

recordset created by accessing the

recordset

property of the control:

window.onload = function () {

oDataset = document.getElementById(“TextData”).recordset;

};

This code creates a global variable named

oDataset

that points to the recordset containing all the data.

You can iterate through the recordset by using the

moveFirst()

moveLast()

moveNext()

, and

movePrevious()

methods in combination with the

EOF

(end of file) and

BOF

(beginning of file) mark-

ers. For example, here’s a basic code outline to iterate through the recordset starting from the first record

and ending with the last:

oDataset.moveFirst();

while (!oDataset.EOF) {

//do something with the data here

oDataset.moveNext();

}

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Interacting with Plugins

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