Interactive ASP database stuff

[joshwa]

Hello !

Where the chuff do I start?

I need to do a fairly simple interactive database, whereby specific people can enter stuff into it, and several people can view the status of the db.

Problem is, they need it now (ie yesturday), and I don't know ASP - fantastic.

Do I start with an access database?
Where do I go from there?

Thanks

Josh

[Spunkey]

Hello!

asp101 is your friend - linky linky
they've got some sample code to do exactly what you're after.
do you know VB at all? ASP isnt all that different

[DaBeeeenster]

What skills do you have already? Can you program at all? Do you have any relational database design experience?

[joshwa]

None
Nope
and not really

I've done programming previously, pascal, javascript, java, visual basic, c - and I've done databases at university, so I've set up a basic database - we only really need a simple spreadsheet at the moment (but in a db, so it can be accessed on the web) -

I've exported an ASP page from Access 2k -
using these instructions: http://databases.about.com/library/weekly/aa011401a.htm

and setup the ODBC connection, but now I'm just not getting anything come up on the page (error 500). - i've got iis setup on my machine

we have windows webservers - so asp is ideal (plus some of the other guys here know some of it)

[welly]

If you're getting a 500 error and you're using IE, go to Tools/Internet Options/Advanced and turn off "Show friendly HTTP error messages". This should give you the ASP error, if thats the problem. Post your code you've got and the ASP error and I'm sure one of us can help you out.

[luap.h]

If you have Dreamweaver MX (might work below, but posting from experience)

You can connect the DB up using MX, drag and drop the fields where-ever, pass your parameters ...asp?id=43 etc - its all pretty straighforward

There are some great tutorials on the web about getting MX, ASP and IIS working together as well - or I could sell you my ASP for Dummies

basically you create your Access DB, link it to the webserver using ODBC (if you have admin access to the webservers OS)or DSN's

Choose your table/recordset using SQL and ASP(VB or JScript) and display it. If you want data entry, use a form, naming all form objects properly and its as easy as that

Dreamweaver, though some may find it as cheating, is real good at it all. I was able to do a simple news article DB thing in a couple of days as part of my final yr project - users logged in, entered news items, deleted them etc and normal plebs could view them - just remember, MX and google are your best friends

[joshwa]

Cheers, I've managed to get it working - the ASP thing wasn't working correctly on my computer - the IWAM account didn't have admin rights, only guest rights so was unable to run ASP correctly...

thanks for the help .

I'll probably need to do some on-line forms next - but I think I'll leave it for a while.

[Shad]

Drop everything and do it in ASP.NET instead. I started out writing 'classic' ASP and for the most part that's still what I do, but I'm doing more and more doing .NET now and finding it quite difficult adjusting to having the editor do things for me. Sounds silly but it's a bit frustraiting.

[welly]

Good advice, Shad.. I've been an asp developer for 6 years now and really, really need to drop classic asp and move to .net. It's finding time to train myself though, as my company doesn't look to be wanting to do that. But for anyone just getting into web development, on the windows side of things, you wouldn't go wrong heading straight down the .net route.