1.8

}
}
The script flow: when scripts run
When Connect generates the actual output – letters, web pages or emails -, it opens a record
set and merges it with the template. It takes each record, one by one, and runs all scripts for it,
in a specific order, as explained below.
First all Control Scripts are executed, in the order in which they appear in the Scripts pane.
Control scripts don't touch the content of the sections themselves, but they change the way a
template is outputted, for example by selecting or omitting sections from the output (see
"Control Scripts" on page645).
Then the template scripts are executed, once for each section, in the order in which they
appear in the Scripts pane.
Template scripts can change the contents of the current section in a template.
This type of script must have a selector: text, an HTML element and/or a CSS selector (see
"Writing your own scripts" on page624).
Running a template script starts with looking in the current section for pieces of content that
match the script's selector.
Important to note is that if nothing matches the selector, the script is not executed.
In a Print context, the template scripts in the Scripts pane run once for each section and then
for each Master Page (see "Master Pages" on page350). Next, each processed Master Page is
put behind every page to which it should be applied.
Scripts are NOT executed again for every page. Post-pagination scripts currently don’t exist in
Connect.
Selectors in Connect
Selectors are patterns used to select one or more HTML elements. They were originally
developed to be able to define the layout of web pages without touching their content, through
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). In Connect, since each section in a Connect template is in fact
an HTML file (see "Editing HTML" on page466), the very same selectors can be used in style
sheets (see "Styling templates with CSS files" on page553) and template scripts (see
"Personalizing Content" on page592 and "Writing your own scripts" on page624). Selectors
can increase the speed with which a template and data are merged; see "Use an ID as
selector" on page636.
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