This ASP stuff seems to be a hot topic! So, if you're still interested in learning more about it, read on:
I have created a page on my website which demonstrates one of the many aspects of ASP which makes it so cool to work with. The page is at http://www.connectrans.com/takempis/takidc/submit.asp if you want to take a look at it. I'm going to explain to you how I made it in this article.
Below is a screen shot of the browser's-eye view of the page, as it appears when you first go to it.
After filling out the form with some information, and selecting "Purple" from the color selections, this is what it looks like:
Quite a difference, eh? Note that even the text on the page has changed, as well as the form fields containing the text I typed in. How did I do it? Well, first, I specified the same page as the ACTION property of the form. this submits the data from the form back to the same ASP page. then I had to insert some server-side scripting. To begin with, I placed the values of the form fields in variables, so that I could use them easily:
To review: The Request Object has several objects which are properties of itself. One of these is the Form object. The Form object has a Collection of parameters, each with the name of the form fields which submitted to the page. If a parameter doesn't exist, or the form field is empty, the value of the parameter is "" (an empty string).
My form had 3 form fields: "name," "other," and "color." The Radio buttons are all actually parts of one radio button "group" called "color." Each radio button had a value of the hex code for that color. Since a radio button group always has some value, I used this to test both the value of the group (if any) and whether the page was reached by a hyperlink or from a form. If the page was reached by a hyperlink, the value of the radio button group "color" would have been "". So I assigned the variable "color" with the value of the color grey initially, and set a flag variable to 0.
Next, I wanted to change the background color of the table to the color selected in the group, if the page was reached by filling out the form. I did this by creating a background color for the table (this made sure that there was a "bgcolor" tag for the table), and substituting a Response.Write routine in the value for the color, as you can see below (I have superimposed a snippet of the HTML code over the actual FP Editor representation of the table):
You'll also notice that I put Response.Write routines in the text boxes, to write in the values typed in the form in these boxes as well. Of course, since the value is initially an empty string, the first time you go to the page, these fields are blank. You can't see the labels because all of the labels are white.
Now for the text on the page. All I had to do was test the value of the "flag" variable to determine which text was sent to the page in either case (form filled out or not):
Note how easy it is to put these kinds of conditional statements in an ASP page, using FrontPage 98. You just type in all of the text, and place if/else conditional statements around them.
Of course, this little demonstration hardly touches on the applications of this ability. I have used this to create pages which populate forms from a database, and each time the page is submitted, the next record is retrieved and entered. I have also used this in conjunction with other technologies to post information from database records to Newsgroups, automatically. And that's not even touching the surface of what you can do with this technology, using a little imagination.
So, get out your thinking caps, and get back to work!
Author: Kevin Spencer
Date: 12/05/97
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