ASP Guestbook Application

Overview

This is a small ASP (Microsoft Active Server Pages) application that implements a guestbook.

The guestbook has the following main-functionality:

• Display entries with author-name, e-mail, date and text
• Administration mode: delete entries
• Navigation: jump to first page, last page, previous page, next page, discrete pages

The sample is ready-to-use. As-few-as-possible HTML-formating (e.g. fonts) is done in order to keep it clear. You could modify the following things:

• Change the language of the texts
• Adjust the design to your needs
• Extend the functionality (please e-mail me, if you improved it, since I'm very interested in any improvements)

Details

The guestbook stores its entries in a Microsoft Access 2000 database (Access 97 works quite well, too - just convert the database) and accesses the database using ADO (Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects, see http://www.microsoft.com/data/ado/). To use the Access 2000 database, you probably need the latest version of the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC, also from http://www.microsoft.com/data/ado/).

I tried to comment the ASP code as well as I can. When you look through it with a syntax-coloring editor, you should find the comments quite easily. I also tryied to minimize the allways-present problem of having code mixed with design/content be separating ASP from HTML as much as I can. Still I wanted to keep all things in one file to make it compact. So the ASP pages became a bit longer than it normally would.

I'm running this guestbook under a german version of NT 4.0 server, service pack 6a (the 'a' is very important). Altough, SP 4 or 5 should be no problem, too.

A last tip for editing ASP files: I tried a lot of editors (including Frontpage, InterDev, etc.), I found the most usable program is EditPlus, which you can find on http://www.editplus.com/.

Please feel free to ask any questions you have by e-mail: keim@zeta-software.de.

History

18 Oct 2000 - updated script.