Beginning ASP Databases, Wrox Press

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Beginning ASP Databases
John Kauffman
with
Kevin Spencer and Thearon Willis
Wrox Press Ltd.
Beginning ASP Databases
© 1999 Wrox Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or
by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles or reviews.
The author and publisher have made every effort in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the
information. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied.
Neither the authors, Wrox Press nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to
be caused either directly or indirectly by this book.
First Published 1999
Latest Reprint October 2000
Published by Wrox Press Ltd,
Arden House, 1102 Warwick Road, Acocks Green,
Birmingham, B27 6BH, UK
ISBN 1-861002-7-26
Trademark Acknowledgements
Wrox has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book
by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Wrox cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Credits
Authors Managing Editor
John Kauffman Joanna Mason
Kevin Spencer
Thearon Willis
Development Editor
Sarah Bowers
Additional Material
Chris Blexrud
David Buser
Technical Editors
David Sussman Joanna Mason
Chris Ullman Dianne Parker
Andrew Polshaw
Technical Reviewers
Burt Abreu
Design/Layout
Chris Blexrud
Tom Bartlett
David Buser
Mark Burdett
Charles Caison Jnr
Jonathan Jones
Robert Chang
John McNulty
Michael Corning
William Fallon
Steve Danielson
David Boyce
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Marco Gregorini
Scott Haley
Rob Hebron
Figures
Jon Jenkins David Boyce
Manohar Kamath William Fallon
Pieter Reint Siegers Kort
Robert MacDonald
Cover
Sam MacDonald
Chris Morris
Dave Navarro Sr
Geoff Pennington
John Timney
Index
David Williams
Alessandro Ansa
About the Authors
John Kauffman
John Kauffman was born in Philadelphia, the son of a chemist and a nurse. John's family of six shared daily brain
teasers and annual camping forays that covered most of the 50 United States. After jobs weeding strawberry patches,
bussing tables, running spotlights for rock and roll concerts, touring North America with a drum and bugle corps,
prematurely leaving three colleges, stuffing voles for a mammologist, packing boxes of rat poison, tarring roofs,
delivering drapes in New York City, laboring in a candy factory, teaching canoeing, driving a forklift, studying tiger
beetles in the Chihuahua desert, managing a picture framing factory, coaching a youth yacht racing team and
volunteering as a human guinea pig for medical research, John (to the great relief of all around him) earned a pair of
degrees in the sciences from The Pennsylvania State University and appeared to settle down. He then conducted
research for Hershey Foods in the genetics of the cacao tree and the molecular biology of chocolate production.
Subsequently he moved to Rockefeller University where he identified, cloned and sequenced DNA regions which control
the day and night biochemical cycles of plants.
But science didn't hold a candle to a woman he met in 1985 and married. Since then he has followed Liz in her career
as a diplomat across four continents. They moved to Tanzania in 1986 and John began work with computers and
business management in an assistance program for subsistence-level farmers. In 1990 they moved to Taiwan and then
mainland China where John provided software training services to multi-national corporations and the diplomatic
community in Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Sichuan. During the graduation banquet for one course he was
honored by his students with a special entree of snake bile, frog skin and turtle meats.
John and Liz performed their most significant genetics experiments in 1988 and 1990 with the production of their
children Sylvia and John. Growing up in Africa and China, they are doing well hashing through another generation's
worth of brain teasers and camping trips.
John now divides his freelance consulting time evenly between teaching, writing and programming, primarily in the
areas of Visual Basic, Word macros, Access and Access Programming, and ASP. John is available for contract training in
Asia, Europe and North America by contacting
Training@Kauffmans.org
.
This book is dedicated my parents in appreciation of their tremendous effort raising my siblings and me: to my father,
who spent so much of his time helping us to understand science and mathematics; and to my mother, who invested so
much of herself in facilitating our far-reaching interests in science, music and business. But their greatest gift was
helping us to understand how other people think, feel and learn, and to value what others have to say. That gift is the
key to my success. It is my parents' lessons that allow me to listen to my students and clients, then work with them to
achieve their goals.
Kevin Spencer
I started programming in C in the early '90's and wrote a number of shareware programs for DOS, most of which were
Door programs for BBSs. In the process, I learned to construct relational databases in C, and later worked with
Microsoft Visual FoxPro and Access. As Internet Database Connectivity technologies began to emerge from Microsoft, I
learned them as well, and several years ago, started my business, "Site Design by TAKempis," which specializes in
Internet Database application programming with ASP/ADO. Microsoft awarded me the MVP award in 1997. I have
written articles about Microsoft FrontPage and ASP/ADO for several online magazines, including Wrox's ASP Today.
Thearon Willis
A senior consultant with 19 years of IT experience, Thearon is currently a consultant for an International Insurance
company providing Web programming services. His Web development tools of choice are ASP, Dynamic HTML, Visual
Basic and SQL Server. Thearon lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with his wife and daughter.
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To my wife Margie for her patience and understanding while I write yet another book, I love you very much.
Introduction
Microsoft created Active Server Pages (ASP) to sew together a group of technologies for creating modern web sites,
which can intelligently interact with the user at the front end and with servers and datastores at the back end. Among
these technologies is ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), which allows easy, powerful and robust control of technologies that
access datastores. This book explains the theory and practice of using ADO with ASP by presenting numerous examples,
exercises, lists of common errors and quizzes. The emphasis is on the author's proven teaching techniques and the
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presentation of the most commonly used features of ADO in ASP. If you read each chapter and do the exercises you will
have a portfolio of several dozen data-intensive web pages of increasing complexity - a fine return on your investment.
What Is This Book About?
This book explains, demonstrates and applies techniques that lie at the intersection of the two great tools of the
Information Age. One tool, the database, is relatively old. The other, the World Wide Web, is quite new. ASP and ADO
together provide the ability to combine these two to maximum effect.
Even the most computer-illiterate managers realize that business as we know it today could not exist without databases
to hold information on customers, orders, inventory, accounts, payroll and every other facet of commercial activity.
Many of the great advances in productivity since 1960 have been possible because of the speed and accuracy that
databases provide for business information. However, until recently there has not been a convenient way to provide
universal access to this information. For example, it was difficult for a worker while on a trip to Buenos Aires to register
her overtime hours with the payroll department back at headquarters in Orlando.
The newer technology is the World Wide Web, a universal (well, planetary) method of exchanging and viewing
information. Since the explosion of Web access that started in the mid-1990s, virtually all computer users are now able
to view the information offered on the Internet. However, it has not always been easy to provide customized pages,
designed to display database information specifically useful to an individual user. For example, a person interested in
buying a boat saw a static page with a generic picture of the boat; it was difficult for a web programmer to create a
dynamic page displaying an image of the boat, configured with the sailor's specific requests regarding sail plan, colors
and deck fittings.
ASP and ADO make it relatively easy to bring together these two great information technologies of our time, to provide
the capacity to use the data of business through the Web. With ASP-ADO the traveling technician can now use any
computer in any country, with any browser connected to the web, to send in her overtime hours directly to her
company's payroll database. The sailor can not only see his prospective purchase in the color and sail plan of his
desires, but docked in front of palm trees or pine trees depending on his zip code, with a list of the dealers nearest to
the sailor and the dealers' current inventories. The web page can even suggest the next more expensive yacht if it is
still within the financial grasp of an average citizen in the sailor's zip code.
Why Is This Book Different?
There are many books that present the ideas of ASP and a dozen more that focus on ADO. Some are quite advanced
and assume an existing knowledge of other techniques. But to date no other book has been written with the intention of
coaching beginners through their first uses of ADO on ASP pages.
The first word in the title of this book is Beginning, thus setting the tone for the tome. The theory is covered, but then
there are also copious examples for you to study. An important role of any teacher is to select which out of all the
software's features to teach, and in what order. Considerable effort has been made in this book to present material in
the best way for it to be learned; not alphabetically or divided by object or according to historical precedent. In this
book we start by stating a business goal, then present the minimum techniques to achieve that goal. After we have the
basics working we add on the most commonly used parameters to enhance that technique.
Written By An Experienced Teacher
In many ASP books the code is simply demonstrated, and the assumption is that the reader can learn why code was
written just by looking at the final result. I think that is a big jump for most beginners. Although I am also a
programmer, I am primarily a teacher, with over a thousand students in classrooms and on-line ASP courses. I keep a
notebook of students' questions and where students make mistakes in exercises. This body of knowledge is wrapped up
and presented in this book in ways that are most useful for the classroom or home-student.
My goal is not to write the book that presents the most depth or breadth of ASP and ADO solutions. Rather, my goal is
to do the best job of explaining how to build your first fifty pages using ADO with ASP. After you master this book and
go on you will find additional ways to perform tasks and additional features in the software. But those discoveries are
for the future. The purpose of this book is to focus your attention on what you must learn to get started and to insulate
you from the sea of non-essential material which can overwhelm a beginner.
Exercises
Each chapter ends with one or more exercises. Keep your solutions on file as they can become a good portfolio when
you apply for a job or make a presentation to a client. Furthermore, you know the code works and you can cut and
paste it into the pages of future sites.
Quizzes
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