ASP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples
Dr. Herong Yang, Version 5.00

Design Overview

This section describes design overview of a simple ASP application, hyBook, a guest book application.

After I published by tutorial notes on my Web site, I wanted to provide a guestbook tool to allow visitors to share their comments with other visitors and myself. So I started to put together a simple guestbook application in ASP with MS Access database. While doing this, I have collected many interesting notes that might be useful to you.

Let me first provide you some design highlights before going into any details.

Functional requirements:

  • hyBook should allow visitors to view all existing comments collected in the guestbook.
  • hyBook should allow visitors to enter new comments anonymously.
  • hyBook should organize comments by topics.
  • hyBook should allow Webmasters to manage topics and comments.

Technical highlights:

  • Two tables will be used in hyBook: "Topic" stores topics, and "Comment" stores comments. Both tables will be stored in a MS Access database file.
  • A single ASP page will be used for visitors to enter new comment and view existing comments.
  • Two ASP page will be used for Webmaster to manage topics and comments.
  • All ASP pages should be as secure as possible.
  • All ASP pages should be configurable to allow Webmaster to merge into existing Website layout and style.

Last update: 2006.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 ASP (Active Server Pages) Introduction

 IIS (Internet Information Services) 5.0

 MS Script Debugger

 VBScript Language

 ASP Built-in Run-time Objects

 ASP Session

 Creating and Managing Cookies

 Managing Sessions with and without Cookies

 scrrun.dll - Scripting Runtime DLL

 Managing Response Header Lines

 Calculation Speed and Response Time

 ADO (ActiveX Data Object) DLL

 Working with MS Access Database

Guest Book Application Example

Design Overview

 Database Tables

 Configuration File

 Page Layout Template File

 Guest book Main Script

 The Utility Script Library File

 Data Submission Issues

 Webmaster Administration Page

 References

 PDF Printing Version

Dr. Herong Yang, updated in 2010
Design Overview