KooKoo's Guide to ASP!

**kookoo** · 10-27-2008

This is my attempt to write a guide for you fellas who wanna know more about ASP. Also note that English is my third language so be nice

What is ASP?
ASP is short for Active Server Pages, A dynamic serverside programming language created by Microsoft.
How does it work?
When a browser requests an HTML file, the server returns the file
When a browser requests an ASP file, IIS passes the request to the ASP engine. The ASP engine reads the ASP file, line by line, and executes the scripts in the file. Finally, the ASP file is returned to the browser as plain HTML.
Example:

Client => completes registration form, hit register => Server processes the information with the help of ASP using Request.form or Request.Querystring and saves the information into a database (mySQL, Access, SQLserver ) => User gets redirected to another page.

ASP code is imbedded into HTML code but with different kind of tags so the server knows what to snap up and not to. the tags are started with <% and ended with %>

Because ASP is a serverside language the user will never see any parts of the code as stated before, ASPcode gets snapped up by the server and runs the script and produces the result based on your script.

Because of the way the server snaps up the code you can create logins without being afraid that people will know the password or check source of your page because there isn't any ASP code!

Code example of login.asp

Code:

<html>
<head>
<title>login!</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="login.asp?do=login">
<input type="text" name="user">
<input type="password" name="password">
<input type="submit" value="log in">
</form>


<% 
      If Request.Querystring("do") = "login" Then    ' By using Querystring you can get information that is in the url
      User = Request.Form("user")                         ' Request.Form is a function to extract information out of a form                          '
      Password = Request.Form("password")
      If User = "mmowned" And Password = "owns" Then ' If then else is a function to make a statement or to guide the information you have
      Response.Redirect "members.asp"    ' Response.Redirect is just a way to send users to other pages and so on.
      Else
      Response.Redirect "youfail.asp"
      End If
%>
</body>
</html>

If you would check the source of this code you would get this

Code:

<html>
<head>
<title>login!</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="login.asp?do=login">
<input type="text" name="user">
<input type="password" name="password">
<input type="submit" value="log in">
</form>
</body>
</html>

Since I am not good at writing guides nor tutorials, just ask me questions and I'll answer them