Server-side Includes

The Sambar Server Server Side include implementation is based on the Apache implementation. Server-side includes allow you to embed commands in an HTML file that are carried out when the document is served to a browser. This functionality is also available using the proprietary Sambar Server tags, which perform considerably than faster, but are non-portable.

Using Server-side includes you can offer dynamically generated data such as the current date or time, include the output of a CGI script in a Web page, or signature files that are appended or prepended to all of your Web pages. All this comes with the cost of additional processing on the server to parse for the SSI directives within the HTML file. For this reason, you must configure the Sambar Server with the file extension that should be processed for Server-side includes; by default, the SSI files must have the extension .shtml. See the Configuration documentation for additional details on configuring or disallowing SSIs.

SSI Overview

SSIs appear in HTML documents within comment tags, beginning with . The following is the basic format:

where #command is the include command to be executed (see below for a list of supported commands). The following illustrates how to display when the current document was last modified:

Supported Commands

The following is a list of commands and their associated tags:

include
include will insert the text of a document into the parsed document. This command accepts the following tag(s):
- file gives a pathname relative to the current directory. ../ cannot be used in this pathname (this is not enforced by the Sambar Server).
- virtual is a (%-encoded) URL relative to the current document being parsed. The URL cannot contain a scheme or hostname, only a path (a query string is not permitted). If it does not begin with a slash (/) then it is taken to be relative to the current document.
  IMPORTANT! If the file does not begin with a slash (/), it is treated as a standard HTML file and sent uninterpreted.
  If the file begins with a slash (/), then the included file may be any valid URL (i.e. HTML file, Sambar Server template, shtml file; or even CGI/WinCGI command). It is recommended that all include files have a leading slash (/) and avoid using relative paths.
echo prints the value of one of the include variables (defined below). All dates are printed in the standard Sambar Server date format. The only valid tag to this command is var, whose value is the name of the variable you wish to echo.
exec executes a given CGI or WinCGI script. Valid tags are:
- cgi will execute the CGI script specified by the value. The CGI must be found in the cgi-bin directory.
- wincgi will execute the WinCGI script specified by the value. The WinCGI must be found in the cgi-win directory.

SSI Environment Variables

The following is a list of variables that are made available to parsed documents (most CGI variables, are also made available):

DOCUMENT_NAME: The current filename.
DOCUMENT_URI: The virtual path to this document (such as /foo/zippy.shtml).
DATE_LOCAL: The current date, local time zone.
DATE_GMT: Same as DATE_LOCAL but in Greenwich mean time.
LAST_MODIFIED: The last modification date of the current document.
All environment variables available in the Sambar Server Scripting language are also available here (i.e. day, hour, document_uri).

Unsupported SSI Commands

The following SSI commands are not supported by the Sambar Server at this time:

config
printenv
set
fsize
flastmod
if / else / elif constructs

Extending SSI Commands
Server-side include commands may be extended using the Sambar Server DLL interface (sa_cmd_init). See the sample programs included with the Sambar Server for more information. Copyright 1995 to 1997 Sambar Technologies