"response" Object - Sending Data to Client

ASP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟"response" Object - Sending Data to Client

This section provides a tutorial example on how to use the 'response' object provided by the ASP programming interface to send data to the client, the Web browser.

The "response" object is also a rich object. It contains all the information the server wants to send to the browser, and methods to manage that information:

Cookies: A collections of cookie objects the server wants to send to the browser.
Buffer: A Boolean property indicating whether to buffer the page until the contents are completed.
Charset: A property representing the character set name in HTTP response header.
ContentType: A property representing the content type name in the HTTP response header.
Expires: A property representing the period of time before the page cached on a proxy server expires.
IsClientConnected: A Boolean property indicating whether the browser has disconnected from the server.
Status: A property representing the status in the HTTP response header.
AddHeader name, value: A method to set or change the value of a variable in the HTTP response header.
AppendToLog(string): A method to append the specified string to the log file of the Web server.
BinaryWrite(data): A method to send binary data to the browser.
Clear(): A method to clear any buffered HTML output.
End(): A method to stop add data to the HTML output from both script statements and static HTML data.
Flush(): A method to sends buffered HTML output immediately to the browser.
Redirect(url): A method to redirect the browser to another URL.
Write(string): A method to write the specified string to the HTML output.

The following ASP page gives you an idea how to use the response object and its buffer mechanism.

<script language="vbscript" runat="server">
'  response_buffer_test.asp
'  Copyright (c) 2002 by Dr. Herong Yang
'  This program shows how to use the buffer in the response object
'
   response.write("<html><body>")
   response.write("<b>Tests on the response object</b>:</br>")
   response.Buffer = true
   response.write("Text line 1.<br/>")
   response.Clear()
   response.write("Text line 2.<br/>")
   response.End()
   response.write("Text line 3.<br/>")
   response.write("</body></html>")   
</script>

Output:

Text line 2.

As you can see from the output, the first text line was cleared out from the response buffer by the call to Clear(). The call to End() stopped the Web server to put any more text to the output. This was why the output only had the second text line.