Let's Run Our First ASP Script

Remember, you must save the text file

FirstScript.asp

file in the \Chapter13
Directory. In order to run each of our programs in this chapter, we need to have our web browser running and have PWS started up. Fire up your connection to the Internet and then start the Personal Web Server. From the Main screen, click Start:

Notice that the name of my machine is

http://buckaroo.

Note the name that appears on your screen, because that is how the PWS will locate the FirstScript.asp
.

Since everything is a go, you can minimize the PWS and it will operate for you in the background.

Try It Out - Running the ASP Script

Now bring up your Internet Browser. In the address box, you must enter the fully qualified name of the machine and the file in the browser dialog box. So you should enter

http://mycomputer/Ch13//FirstScript.asp

in the address line.

The

mycomputer

should be whatever showed up in the PWS main screen where it says where your home page is located. Again, my machine is buckaroo
. Please use whatever shows up for your machine. Also, do not choose File-Open to load your ASP file because it will not run this way. You must type in the complete URL of FirstScript.asp
directly in the browser itself.

If you change the file in Notepad as you are debugging you can just press the Refresh button on the browser to reload the page you just modified and saved.

If you are logged into the Internet but forget to start the Personal Web Server, you will be greeted by the following message:

If you misspell the name of the file, the PWS can't find what you are looking for. In this case, you will get the famous Error 404. If you get this, please ensure the name is entered in the address box correctly.

Ok, now when we run

FirstScript.asp

file that contains the ASP script, the output is rendered in the browser as shown below. Cool!

OK, let's take a closer look at the script that generated this page. Now here is the important part. If we take a look at the View-Source from the browser, we can see what it actually received. Notice that the ASP script actually generated dynamic HTML code! In other words, the VBScript generated HTML code, on the fly, that was sent to the browser. The numbers displayed weren't hard-coded using HTML tags and text – they were dynamically generated by the ASP script that was run when the

.asp

page was accessed. The browser then received the page as if it were simply standard HTML - which it is, of course, in the sense that what is sent to the browser when ASP has finished its magic is straight HTML. The ASP runs on the server and generates HTML that can be displayed by any browser anywhere.

You now you have an idea of how ASP works from 50,000 ft. The ASP script on the server generates dynamic HTML code and simply 'serves' the browser something it can understand - HTML. Neat, eh? That is the beauty of server side VBScript used to generate ASP code. We can send any customized information at all to any browser. Now it's easy to see how we could extract any arbitrary database information and send it to the client. We don't need to know in advance what to send, we simply use VBScript to generate the specific HTML code – on the fly.

One of the things to keep in mind is that every variable or constant used in an Active Server Page is a variant.

If you now wish one of your friends to access your machine over the Internet to see your page, this is where you need the IP address. When I logged in to the Internet, my service provider issued the IP address 206.217.104.199 to me for this session. So anyone on the planet can log into your site to see your page if they entered.

http:// 206.217.104.199/FirstScript.asp