The discrepancy between your FWX and legacy PRG scripts is not due to the fact that they are different file types, but rather due to the different methods they use to send results back to the browser.  Your old PRG files use the html_out variable to send data to the browser, while your new FWX files either include HTML text outside the code delimiters, or utilize Response.Write.  You can only use one of these techniques during a particular request.  To understand this, you should first understand how FoxWeb 2.X processes outbound data:

 

FWX files are not processed in real time by FoxWeb.  What happens instead, is that they are converted to regular PRG and FXP files the first time they are requested (or after they are modified).  HTML code blocks in FWX files (blocks outside <% and %> delimiters), are actually converted to FoxPro code that calls the Response.Write method.  From this you can see that your statement that "These three functions do not ... call Response.Write() directly" is incorrect.  Any FWX file containing HTML code blocks, causes calls to Response.Write, even if the original FWX code does not contain such calls.

 

If buffering is disabled, then calls to Response.Write result in data being sent out to the client immediately.  If on the other hand buffering is enabled, FoxWeb accumulates output in the Response.OutputBuffer property until the end of the request (or until Response.Flush is called).

 

After execution of the script is completed, FoxWeb runs the following pseudo code:

 

 

The above pseudo code explains why you are getting different behavior depending on the buffering setting.  If Response.Buffer is .F. (or if you called Response.Flush in your script), then data will have already been sent out, so the content of html_out is simply ignored.  If on the other hand buffering is enabled, html_out is sent to the browser and the content of Response.OutputBuffer is ignored.

 

As you can see from the above, there's no way to mix use of the Response object (or HTML blocks in FWX files) and the html_out variable in the same request.  This actually holds true for all other objects that utilize the Response object, such as the Session and Auth objects.

 

You can still share common headers and footers, but you will have to modify the files that contain this content.  Instead of creating FWX files, you should place your content in text files that can be read via FILETOSTR and sent to the browser via html_out, or Response.Write as necessary.  These files can even contain expressions, that get processed with the MergeTxt function:

 

First the FWXHead function, which gets called by FWX files:

 

 

html_out = 'Content-Type: Text/html' + CHR(10) + CHR(10) ;     + MergeTxt(FILETOSTR('head.txt'))

The corresponding header and footer functions will be similar, with the difference that the PRG versions will add content to html_out instead of sending the content type:

 

html_out = html_out + MergeTxt(FILETOSTR('header.txt'))

 

Obviously, if your txt files don't contain any dynamic expressions, you don't need to process their content with MergeTxt:

 

html_out = html_out + FILETOSTR('header.txt')

 

And finally, if you want to be able to edit your text files in an HTML editor, or open them in a web browser, you can give them an 'htm' extension instead of 'txt'.  It really doesn't matter what the extension of the file is, because FILETOSTR simply reads its content.