About Internet Database Connector

With the WWW service and the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers provided with Internet Information Server and Personal Web Server, you can:

Create Web pages with information contained in a database.
Insert, update, and delete information in the database based on user input from a Web page.
Perform other Structured Query Language (SQL) commands.

Conceptually, database access is performed by Internet Information Server or Personal Web Server as shown in the following illustration.

Web browsers (such as Internet Explorer, or other browsers) submit requests to the Internet server by using HTTP. The Web server responds with a document formatted in HTML. Access to databases is accomplished through a component of the Web server called Internet Database Connector (IDC). Internet Database Connector, Httpodbc.dll, is an ISAPI DLL that uses ODBC to gain access to databases.

IDC uses two types of files to control how the database is accessed and how the output Web page is constructed. These files are Internet Database Connector (.idc) files and HTML extension (.htx) files.

The .idc files contain the necessary information to connect to the appropriate ODBC data source and execute the SQL statement. An .idc file also contains the name and location of the HTML extension file.

The .htx file is the template for the actual HTML document that will be returned to the Web browser after the database information has been merged into it by Internet Database Connector.