Aspect: Active Server Page Control Toolkit

Overview

Aspect is an Active-X component for Active Server Pages Development.

It provides the following:

• HTML Grid Control for complete grid operations and display and update of Database Date in grid format.
• SQL Templates for powerful query building for data retrieval or update.
• Parameter String object for powerful query string management facilitating the powerful navigation features needed in Web Database Forms.
• Date conversion and parsing object for powerful date validation and conversion.
• Optional buffering of HTML output.
• Object to allow image/binary upload from the browser.
• File object for powerful file manipulation, including binary files.
• Simple encryption for password management.

The Grid control has the following features:

• Powerful database update features, allowing for separate SQL for select, insert, update and delete.
• Automatic generation of SQL if desired.
• Form mode and grid mode for data display/update.
• Provision for Date, Integer, Floating Point, Text and Boolean fields.
• Custom field and record validation on the browser.
• Full control on the server side of the processing and validation of entered data.
• Connection to any ODBC/ADODB data source.
• Can work without a data source.
• Custom Error handling.

In an ASP page, the developer instantiates an Aspect object on the server, declares the fields or columns to be displayed (including any HTML tag), connects to the database using ADODB and specifies the required select, update and delete SQL. When the ASP page is run the page is presented to the user on the browser for view or update, or whatever mode has been specified.

The developer on a shallow learning curve easily leverages knowledge of SQL, VB and basic HTML. The developer platform of choice is Visual Interdev.

Typical data manipulation scenarios are efficiently handled by using combinations of the Aspect feature set, ASP basics and HTML. For example:

• Header detail screens such as the standard order - line items relationship.
• Multi row and single row processing.
• Complete control over browser state.
• Pre and post save or update processing on the browser.
• Field Validation.
• Fully formatted reports.
• Parameters to handle links between record sets and ASP pages are efficiently controllable.

The benefits of these facilities are:

• The developer and enterprise are able to focus on completed applications using high-level business object thinking that approaches the maturity achieved by products such as PowerBuilder and Visual Basic in client/server environments.
• Time-to-deployment potentials enable the possibility of data intensive applications for the intranet to be selected rather than client/server.

Programmatic interfaces are available as required to:

• Validate user input using VBScript or Jscript.
• Return messages from the database.
• Pre and post insert or update processing on the browser.
• Usage of stored procedures.

Because all the manipulation is done in optimized machine code it utilizes much less processor bandwidth on the server than pure scripting solutions.

Aspect is "electronically delivered" only