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SharePoint 2007 Page Life Cycle - Beta1TR
April 20, 2006
At this point in time we haven’t seen any information about the SharePoint 2007 page life cycle. This post discusses the information about this topic as we understand it today and is kinda preliminary, so don’t hesitate to send us any additions or amendments ( info@lcbridge.nl).
In SharePoint 2007 the ASP.NET engine is tightly integrated with SharePoint. After a HTTP request the ASP.NET engine calls the WSS file provider. The WSS file provider is responsible for returning a page which is either retrieved from a file or the database. Pages retrieved from the database will optionally be parsed by the SafeMode parser. So contrary to what you may have heard, ghosting and unghosting doesn’t go away.
Although the SafeMode parser still only applies to content in the database, it is possible in SharePoint 2007 to turn off the SafeMode parser alltogether, or configure it at a more finegrained level. You could for example apply the SafeMode parser to a document library.
The ASP.NET engine then compiles the page returned by the WSS file provider. When the ASP.NET engine completes the compilation it asks the WSS file provider to fetch the page layout class which is also compiled. The ASP.NET engine adds SharePoint context data to the web meta data and then retrieves the master page associated to the SharePoint page. The master page is compiled and a response is returned to the client.