Hi,
I have sort of solved it, I have a script now that tests for the presense of frames when the page is called from the href, and if the frame is not present, it opens the frames page and puts the correct page in the frames.
This is working, for what I wanted it to do. The code works on a the onload, so the page loads all the way first and I don't like that, but at least it works.
I could not make nippi's suggestion work. Everything nippi said was right, the name of the frame was on the left side of the property manager, I had both pages open, the frames were presented as targets for the page with the frames, and even with that frame page open concurrently with the button page, I could not see those frames as target from the button page.
I will post the pages so I can show nippi what I meant, I just wasn't able to do that yesterday, as I had a couple of link problems as well. I'll let you know when its up.
Meanwhile here is the code that I used in the parent and child pages to open the pages based on the button press.
in the child pages
function detect()
{
framesetpage="symptomframeset.htm";
thispage=window.location.href;
if (thispage.indexOf('://')<0)
{
thispage="://"+thispage;
};
prefix=thispage.substring(0,thispage.lastIndexOf('://'));
suffix=thispage.substring(thispage.lastIndexOf('://')+3,thispage.length);
// alert('the subpage is:['+prefix+']['+suffix+']');
if (parent.location.href==window.location.href)
{
parent.location.href=framesetpage+"?"+prefix+"&&&"+suffix
};
}
and rewrote the frame page like this
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Symptom Frames Page</TITLE>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--
defaultsubpage="anorexia.htm";
if (location.search)
{
subpage=location.search.substring(1)
}
else
{
subpage=defaultsubpage
}
if (subpage.indexOf('&&&')>=0)
{
prefix=subpage.substring(0,subpage.indexOf('&&&'))+"://";
suffix=subpage.substring(subpage.indexOf('&&&')+3,subpage.length);
subpage=prefix+suffix;
}
// -->
</SCRIPT>
</HEAD>
<SCRIPT>
document.write('<FRAMESET ROWS="175,*" COLS="*" FRAMEBORDER="no" BORDER="0" FRAMESPACING="0">');
document.write('<FRAME NAME="banner" SCROLLING="NO" SRC="symptomsheader.htm">');
document.write('<FRAME SRC="'+subpage+'" NAME="symptom">');
document.write('</FRAMESET>');
</SCRIPT>
</HTML>
and from the button page I just used an href to the child page and the child page does the work of assuring the frames get loaded. This at least works, its just not very efficient. I was going to add another step to load a page that just has the script and not the graphic that causes a slower load in the child, but have not done that yet. Anyways. I will post the pages when I fix a couple of other link problems and then put the link here so you can look at it. I'm new to this end of development, Typically I do backend work, so i have no doubt there is a better way to do it ... I just needed to get a success and this worked. So I'll keep you posted.
thanks so much to nippi for your help and patience
details as they unfold ....
niblet