Copyright: Copyright 1999 Eric Banker


About EasyASP

About EasyASP

Easy ASP is a HTML editor with built in tools to help aid in the design and programming od ASP Code. Currently the program is in the BETA testing phase and does not incorporate all of the functionality that will be in the final version. Being that it is in BETA stage there may be problems or bugs that are unknown to the author. Please feel free to email Me with any information on bugs.

EasyASP is a Donationware program which means that if you like the program you will contribute to the development effort in an amount you deam appropriate. I belive $20 is a good amount.

So What's It Do? Well Easy ASP does many things. There are templates that can help you build ASP code for your web pages, start a blank HTML page, along with ASP, .asa. There are also wizards to help you highlight buttons and I have included tools to help you create Java scripts.

I can be reached by email at ebanker@gmu.edu or you can use the contact page to send me information If you have a bug report please write that in the subject and tell me as much about the problem as you can. I will also entertain any ideas that you may have on adding to the program.

You can always find updated information and the latest versions of EasyASP on the HomePage at http://mason.gmu.edu/~ebanker/EasyAsp/index.html

If you should have any questions or bug reports please email ebanker@gmu.edu. Thank You

Eric Banker  .


Installation of EasyASP

Installation of EasyASP

The installation of EasyASP involves two main steps. First you must download the current version of EasyASP from one of the following web sites:

http://www.optweb.net/ebanker/easyasp

http://mason.gmu.edu/~ebanker/easyasp

Next, if this is your first install of the program, you must download the required libraries for the program. These can be obtained from the site above or from:

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/msvbvm50.exe

Once you have downloaded the required files you must follow the steps below:

1.Install the Microsoft Visual Basic Runtime Libraries (May require a reboot)

2.Install EasyASP by unzipping the file and clicking on the setup.exe file

3.Choose the "Typical Installation" option

4.Follow on screen prompts to finish the install

The program should now be installed on your system and ready to run


Loading the Program

Loading the Program

To load the program you should follow the following steps:

Click on "START" and go to "PROGRAMS" then go to the "EASYASP" option and choose "EASYASP"

On some computers the Install Shield program does not create the required links under the start menu. Under this situation you should click on "MY COMPUTER", then "C:", then "Program Files", then "EasyASP" then double click "EasyASP.exe"

Once inside EasyASP you can get to the other programs through their buttons or there are links under the start menu for them


Opening and Saving Files

Opening and Saving Files

When the program starts there is a clean file already opened on the screen. You have several options at this point. You can either use this file to create an HTML or ASP document or open an exisiting document. This can be done in several ways. You could:

1.Navigate to the directory with the fileviewer on the left side and open the file by double clicking the file in the file viewer

2.Click on the "Open File" button on the top button bar

3.Click "File", "Open File"

4.or on the right toolbar the top icon opens up regular .txt files for editing


Using the templates

Using the Templates

There are several templates to choose from within the program. By default the program is set up to start with the ASP template. You can change this by going to the "View" menu and choosing "Program Options". On the "Other Options" tab in the options dialog you can choose from the following templates: Html, Table, Asp, ASA, or no template. The program will remember your settings here and will place the correct template in the new files that you create.

Most of the templates are pretty simple but the Table template is different. The table template is set up to help you create a good looking web site very quickly. all you really have to do is fill in the information in the places indicated. Not much to it at all.


The Contact Wizard

Using the Contact Wizard

The Connection wizard allows you to create an HTML web page that contains information that will be placed in a Database.

The wizard assumes that you are currently using a Microsoft Access Database for your data, although it would be easy to change it for SQL, Dbase, or whatever.

The wizard consists of two components. The first one being the actual HMTL page. This page will handle taking information in from your web site users and allow them to do some kind of transaction, in this case updating or placing information into a database. The ASP page that will be created will actually contain the code that will put the information that is taken from the html page and place it into an access database. More detailed information on both of these files are in the following section.

There are several parts to creating the HMTL page. The first part would be to actually get the wizard open. To do this you can click on the wizard button on the asp toolbar or you can go from the menu: tools/ASP Wizards/Contact Form.

Once the dialog opens click the button that says create HTML form. Now once it is open you will notice several text boxes to fill out. The first text box says Action Name: (URL). For this you must give the name of the asp page that will be used to process the information and place it into the database. This will be the file that we shall create next so prename it something like process.asp or something of that nature.

In the next section the wizard asks for the fields that will go into the database. For simplicity i have only placed three fields in the wizard. Normally for programming something like this i would place for instance fname or fcompany to indicate that these were variables brought from the html form so you don't get these mixed up with your ASP variables.

The last few buttons ask for what to name the submit and reset buttons. Name them anything you want. It really does not matter.

Once you are finished placing all of your information into the form click the NEXT button to continue on to the ASP part of the wizard, you will notice at this point that the program has created the HTML file and you should be able to see it in the window of the main program.

For the ASP section of this wizard you must have a Database already created. By default the wizard creates the code to connect to an ODBC database connection but this could be easily changed to do a file based connection after the wizard is completed.

What you will need for this wizard as far as a database goes is as follows. You must have one Table within the database, you could call it CUSTOMERS or something of that nature. Within the table there should be three fields by default. You will want to name these fields something that resembles the fields that you created for the HTML section of this wizard. Like if you used fname for the HTML form section to grab a users name you could create a field in the database called NAME.

Now once the database is created we can move on to the creation of the code. As you can see from the dialog there are a few sections that you must fill out. The first section asks for the Database DSN, this would be your ODBC driver name that you created for the database in the ODBC administrator. The second field asks for the Table Name this would be the table that you created for the information, as you recall in my example i named it CUSTOMERS.

Now as we move to the Inputs section you will see that it asks for the form elements. This section is very important. You will want to make sure that the Form elements match exactly with the elements with the HTML form so if your first form element was fname you would place that where it says Frist Form Element.

Once you have completed all of the information you can click the FINISH button. This will complete the code for you. You will notice that another window has been opened up with the code for the ASP page.

Now you will want to SAVE the asp page as the name that you used for the ACTION section of the HTML wizard. you can save the HTML page as anything you want. You are now finished.| Make sure that the database is in the ODBC and place these pages on your ASP enabled web server and point your browser to the HTML page and you can play to your hearts extent.

The code is well commented so it should be no problem adding fields to the code. I only used 3 fields for simplicity but you can add as many as you want by cutting and pasting the code together. Good Luck.


Database Query Wizard

Database Query Wizard

The Database Query Wizard allows you to create an HTML web page that will ask a database for information and return that information to the user via another web page.

The wizard assumes that you are currently using a Microsoft Access Database for your data, although it would be easy to change it for SQL, Dbase, or whatever.

The wizard consists of two components. The first one being the actual HMTL page. This page will handle taking the information from your web site users and allow them to do some kind of transaction, in this case asking the database for information. The ASP page that will be created will actually contain the code that will put the information that is taken from the html page, query the database, and place it into a web page so the user can then view the information. More detailed information on both of these files are in the following section.

There are several parts to creating the HMTL page. The first part would be to actually get the wizard open. To do this you can click on the wizard button on the asp toolbar or you can go from the menu: tools/ASP Wizards/Database Query.

Once the dialog opens click the button that says create HTML form. Now once it is open you will notice several text boxes to fill out. The first text box says Action Name: (URL). For this you must give the name of the asp page that will be used to process the information and place it into the database. This will be the file that we shall create next so prename it something like process.asp or something of that nature.

In the next section the wizard asks for the fields that will br used to query the database. For simplicity i have only placed only two fields in the wizard. Normally for programming something like this i would place for instance fname or flast to indicate that these were variables brought from the html form so you don't get these mixed up with your ASP variables.

The last few buttons ask for what to name the submit and reset buttons. Name them anything you want. It really does not matter.

Once you are finished placing all of your information into the form click the NEXT button to continue on to the ASP part of the wizard, you will notice at this point that the program has created the HTML file and you should be able to see it in the window of the main program.

For the ASP section of this wizard you must have a Database already created. By default the wizard creates the code to connect to an ODBC database connection but this could be easily changed to do a file based connection after the wizard is completed.

What you will need for this wizard as far as a database goes is as follows. You must have one Table within the database, you could call it CUSTOMERS or something of that nature. Within the table there should be at least 3 fields, Here comes the tricky part. For this example you must create another field a 3rd field in the database that will hold a combination of your first and second field. For instance if i were using first and last names as my regular 2 fields i would create a third called firstlast that would contain my name ericbanker like that. You will also probably want to create a few more fields as the user will probably want more information than what they asked for.

You will also want to name these fields something that resembles the fields that you created for the HTML section of this wizard. Like if you used fname for the HTML form section to grab a users name you could create a field in the database called NAME.

Now once the database is created we can move on to the creation of the code. As you can see from the dialog there are a few sections that you must fill out. The first section asks for the Database ODBC driver name, this would be your ODBC driver name that you created for the database in the ODBC administrator. The second field asks for the Table Name this would be the table that you created for the information, as you recall in my example i named it CUSTOMERS. The third field asks for the Database Field Name, this is the combination field that we created in the database. the one that will hold the values of the two pieces of information that we are querying on. in my case firstlast was my field name.

Now as we move to the Inputs section you will see that it asks for the form elements. This section is very important. You will want to make sure that the Form elements match exactly with the elements with the HTML form so if your first form element was fname you would place that where it says Frist Form Element.

The third section asks for your Variable names. This is most important for readability. for instance since this is a variable to store information you could call the firstname variable Vfname for variable first name or something like that. but make it something that relates to the form fields.

Once you have completed all of the information you can click the FINISH button. This will complete the code for you. You will notice that another window has been opened up with the code for the ASP page.

Now you will want to SAVE the asp page as the name that you used for the ACTION section of the HTML wizard. you can save the HTML page as anything you want. You are now finished.

Make sure that the database is in the ODBC and place these pages on your ASP enabled web server and point your browser to the HTML page and you can play to your hearts extent.

The code is well commented so it should be no problem adding fields to the code. I only used 3 fields for simplicity but you can add as many as you want by cutting and pasting the code together. Good Luck.


Password/Login Wizard

Password/Login Wizard

The login wizard has been designed to give you a quick and easy way to protect your web pages on the internet. For this wizard you will need to follow a few steps.

You must first have a database created with one table and two fields within the table. Normally i would name these two fields username and password or something of that nature. After the database has been created you should place the database within the ODBC driver of the ASP server machine.

Next you will want to open the Password dialog. This can be done from the toolbar or from the menu through Tools/ASP wizards/Passwords.

Once the dialog comes up you will want to open the Create HTML and ASP code section. This will open another dialog in which you will have to answer a few questions.

Where it says ODBC driver name place the name that you gave your database within the ODBC here. Next where it says table name place that table name that you create above here. Where it says session variable name it something meaningfull. This will allow users of your web site to log in once per session or once per visit. Without a session variable they would have to log in every time they went to a secure place so make sure this is set.

Now where it says DataBase field names. Place the names of the fields that you created in the database under the corresponding name and password text boxes. So if you made a field called userid you would place that in the name box.

Where it says action name place the very first web page that is to be protected, sometimes this will be the default.asp file itself.

Where it says form name name your html form that the users will create. It really does not matter what it is called.

Under the form fields section you will want to make sure that you have these set to something close to what was listed in the Database field names section. For instance if i named a database field userid i would name this frmuserid

Under the button section you can name them anything you want it really does not matter.

Now you will click the finished button and notice that the code has now been written and placed in a new notepad on the main program's screen. You can now save this file as anything you want.asp

To protect a file you must make sure that it is saved as an ASP file and all you really have to do is include the file you created above like this:

<!--#INCLUDE FILE = "passwordcodepage.asp" -->

you can also do this through the wizard but the code is really not hard at all.

Good luck


Program Options

Setting Program Options

EasyASP currently has a very simple option set. So far the following things that can be changed via the options dialog are as follows:

Tab 1.

1. External Internet Browser

2. External FTP Program (Defaults to EasyFTP)

3. External Database Program (Defaults to EasyDB)

4. External Editor (For using a program like DreamWeaver)

Tab 2.

1. Setting the background color of the main program

2. Setting the colors for the color coding feature. Current colors supported are:

0 black	1 blue

2 green	3 cyan

4 red	5 magenta

6 yellow	7 white

8 gray	9 light blue

10 light green	11 light cyan

12 light red	13 light magenta

14 light yellow	15 bright white

Tab 3.

1. Setting the template you would like used when the program starts up or a new file is created.

More options are on the way


Program Dialogs
Using Program Dialogs

Using the many Program Dialogs

Throughout the program there are many dialogs to help you create your web page. For instance there are dialogs to help with:

1. Inserting Links

2. Inserting Fonts

3. Inserting Tables

4. Inserting Java Scripts

5. Inserting Database Connections

6. Inserting Server Variables

7. .....

and many many more. The important thing to remember about these dialogs is that the program will place the output of the options chosen in the dialog at the current postion of the cursor in the notepad. So for instance, say you wanted to edit the  body tag of a web page. You must first select the text for the current body tag, open up the body dialog, answer the questions, and then press finish. This will add the code in the proper place. All dialogs work this way. So if you have to replace something make sure that you have either 1. deleted it already or 2. have the text selected that you wish to replace.


The File Viewer

Using the File Viewer

The fileviewer is a pretty simple feature of EasyASP. The file viewer allows you to select the directory that all of your Web pages are currently stored and quickly open them for editing. New in this version is the ability to, through a button on the main toolbar, change the "FILTER" of the file viewer back and forth between images and web pages. This allows you to open up your images, make sure they are right, and then go back to coding.

That's about all there is to the fileviewer. Latest News: All fileviewer bugs have been fixed !


Viewing files in a browser

Viewing files in a browser

There is currently 2 different ways to view files from EasyASP. You can:

1. Open a file with the internal browser (Requires Internet Explorer 4.0 or greater)

2. Open files using an External Browser (Requires ANY browser to be installed)

The most important thing to remember about using the browser is that this feature is for HTML files only!

ASP files require that they be run from a server that has Active Server Page Extentions installed on them and they will not view from a browser that is not pointing to a server.

You can also use the internal browser as a regular browser by using the options under the drop down menu "GO" or right clicking on the browser window. There are several preset sites in under the "GO" menu.


Cleaning up html file code

Cleaning up html file code

The HTML Cleaner function of EasyASP is actually code that i did not write. This a program called Tidy and once installed with EasyASP you can find it in your windows system directory. The program has many more options that what i use within the program so if you would like to play with it go right ahead. The main thing to remember with this feature is that it to does not support ASP files and will render them worthless if you run the feature on them. There are warnings that pop up when you try to use this option.


Opening files in another editor

Opening files in another editor

You can now use an external editor allong with EasyASP to edit your documents. EasyASP will not keep in sync with files edited from outside the program so if you use this function please remember to close and then reopen the file if you made any changes outside the program. I added this feature mainly because i use dreamweaver a lot and i thought it would be nice to be able to open my files in a WYSIWYG editor.

This feature is set up in the options dialog and you can choose any editor that you wish. By deafult the program looks for Wordpad but it will not  find it on NT machines because NT stores it in a different place than 98. Enjoy this feature, i wanted it :)


Color coing your document

Color coing your document

EasyASP currently supports a push button style color coding feature. This allows you the user to color code your document as you go. I tend to use this a lot  when i am working with large files that get to be a bit hard on the eyes as all black. I hope to one day have the feature work as you type in the code but alas that is over my head. People need to register to see this feature fully implemented.

In the options dialog you can change the colors that EasyASP color codes. Valid entried are 0-15 and you can find more information on this in the options section of this help file.


Viewing graphics

Viewing graphics

EasyASP currently supports the viewing of .jpg, .bmp, and .gif files. You can not edit these files in any way from within the program but you can view them. I hope  to one day allow users to drag and drop graphics into the files but that's far off :)