Replies

I hear ya, Mark. The impression I got was the VS.NET was really designed to push people into the .NET way of life for applications – as evidenced by the fact that you can’t open a VS 6.0 solution (.sln) file in VS.NET. In fact, I’m surprised that you’re even working standard ASP projects in VS.NET. We stayed with VS 6.0 so there’s no surprises in converted projects. (There were a few unwelcome surprises when we moved from VInterDev 1.0 to 6.0.)

For now I’ve got both VS 6.0 and VS.NET installed on the same machine, and they co-exist well. You even get to choose which de###### to use if there’s an error in a web page. We’ll start to move projects over to ASP.NET slowly on a trial basis later this year. And I’ll keep your complaint in mind. I’m sure it won’t be the last one I hear.

How are you saving the attachments? Hotmail is now sending attachments through a virus scanner, so I’m not sure you can save the file directly using the links. If it’s an image, it may be displayed at the bottom of the message, in which case it’s probably easier to right-click the image and use Save As… to grab the file.

To be honest, I’m having problems with the new pages. Instead of downloading the image, I get a new browser that says it’s for downloading the image, but I end up having to sign in and get sent back to my inbox. It seems easier to use Outlook Express 6 if you’ve got it installed.

Good luck.

I may have lost you, but here goes: When a form is submitted via HTTP the value of a checkbox is only included in the data if the checkbox was checked at the time the form was submitted. So if your form has three checkbox elements (chk1, chk2, chk3), and the user checks only the first, then the Response.Form data includes only chk1. The value of chk1 is whatever you assigned as chk1’s value, or “on” if you didn’t specify a value for the checkbox element.

In VB you can iterate through the submitted form elements using “For Each item In Request.Form … Next”. Here’s a debug script I use to look at submitted data. I’d give you a better example, but someone has borrowed my ASP book with VB examples.

'//
'// Show the contents of a form object returned in an HTTP Request
'//
  Sub dumpFormData(objForm)
  
    If IsEmpty(objForm) Then
      Response.Write "

No Form Data Present"
    Else
      Response.Write "

----- Start Form Data -----"
      For Each Item in objForm
        Response.Write "

" & Item & ": "
        Response.Write objForm(Item) & "" & vbNewline
      Next
      Response.Write "

------ End Form Data ------"
    End If
  
  End Sub

HTH

What’s the error message? I didn’t see anything wrong with the script, and dp seems to do it’s job just fine.

Here’s a tip: Debug client-side JavaScript in Netscape 4.x using the JavaScript Console to view the errors (type java script: in the address bar and hit enter to bring up the console). Netscape does a good job of locating the errors in scripts. And since it’s less forgiving than IE, you’ll often find problems before your users do.

It also saves you having to install MS de######, which can become a real pain if you need to debug ASP pages.

HTH

One thing to consider is whether you (or your company/clients) want to be on the bleeding edge. At a recent seminar, one of the points made hit home: We’re finally getting the information we need to build good, robust, secure applications with technologies like VB, ASP, JSP, Java, etc. Good information on the right and wrong way to build applications with these technologies was not available five years ago when people were starting out, and that kind of information is not available now for those venturing into .NET. It’s begining to trickle in through articles and whitepapers, but the .NET books are not mature.

So if you’re comfortable finding your own way, and work for someone that can tolerate trial and error learning, go for .NET. Otherwise, stick with what’s already working for people. VB/VBA is not going away any time soon.

Don’t know if this will be useful for what you’re doing, but it’s an example of the kind of resources you can find for free UNIX web utilities:

http://www.freeperlcode.com/guide/Remote_S…nt/File_Upload/%5B/url%5D

Unix has a number of languages that provide scripting and processing similar to ASP, and some would say better. Long before ASP on NT, Unix/Perl was running the internet (or so I’ve been told). If you see anything in your provider’s offering about cgi-bin, that’s where to look. Look for JSP as well.

Your provider probably has some information about the type of scripting/programming support available. And there are lots of free utilities that run on UNIX/Linux hosts. Do some searching with Google (web and groups) and you may come up with a solution you can just drop in.

I’d love to help more, but I’m an ASP guy myself.

I’m going to the “.NET Solutions Summit to Secure your Enterprise Applications Seminar” that MS is doing in several cities (some already done). It’s focussed on security issues, but should provide some good insight into how .NET is going to shape up.

I’m attending tomorrow and Wednesday (6/11-12/2002) in Dallas, and I’ll post a review here. If anyone is interested in the details, let me know and I’ll forward or post the email we received announcing the event (if that’s okay with the mod, since it is advertising of sorts). There are three more dates listed in the announcement.

The subject of securing information displayed in a web browser has been discussed for years now in technical writing (and I’m sure) other circles. The browser is not designed for secure information, and with OCR and other technologies available today, there is very little you can do to make it more secure. Unless you know how to disable Windows PrintScreen functionality as well.

That said, if all you really want is to stop most people copying and editing your text, the PDF and graphic suggestions are worthwhile. They’re not 100% secure, but someone would have to have some patience and know-how to get at your text.

Is there script in your mymenus.js file that runs immediately? If there is, try delaying execution until the window is loaded (window.onload). I’ve gotten around some problems that way. Not always clean, but workable.

I use a different de###### than most (InterDev), but doesn’t the standard MS script de###### have the detach from process option? That disconnects the de###### without shutting down the browser. Then you can safely close the de######.

HTH

You don’t really need to nest the if’s in your example. It sounds like if any condition fails, you want the user to correct it – either immediately when entering data or when submitting the whole form. There is a simple trick to re-validate a form with onsubmit if you’re already doing the validation of elements using onchange:

For each form element requiring validation, make sure you set the onchange attribute to return the result of the validation like this:

The return is important because now you can validate the form as follows:

function validateForm()
{
  var f = document.theForm;
  for (var n = 0; n < f.length; n++)
  {
    if (f.elements[n].onchange)
    {
      if (!f.elements[n].onchange())
      {
        f.focus();
        return false;
      }
    }
  }
  return true;
}

Note that onchange looks for the element’s event handler, and if found, onchange() executes it (including any parameters that appear in the event handler). That allows the function to loop through your form looking for things to validate, and stop if something is not right.

Good Luck!

Thanks Mary! That’s even better. I’ll try sending these comments to woody@worpr.com.

Mary,

Just a separate folder in the main pst (mailbox.pst on this machine).

Charlie

Hmmm. Not exactly a tutorial, but I just noticed the lead article at ASPAlliance is an intro to ASP:

http://www.aspalliance.com/alexcampbell/articles/beggining/

HTH
Charlie