Web based School
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The final Chapter of your intense Visual InterDev training has arrived. It seems like
only yesterChapter that you began this journey. You have learned a lot of material in
a relatively short time. The best way to reinforce your learning is to apply it,
which this lesson gives you a chance to do. Your three weeks of training ends with
a case study of an application you help finish. You will be completing an intranet
application for Publishers' Paradise, a large, hypothetical conglomerate that owns
several publishing companies. This application gives you a chance to apply all the
knowledge you've gained in the past three weeks to build a Web-based application.
You should also get a feel for how the components fit together to meet users' needs.
The lesson gives you a lot of the code so you can concentrate on learning how the
pieces fit together, instead of worrying about strict programming. The first part of the lesson describes the application and its purpose and explains
the different components you will be working with to build the application. Next,
you jump right into development by creating the client components, including HTML,
ActiveX, VBScript, images, and music. You then integrate the server components into
the application equation. These components include Active Server Pages and database
connectivity. Next, you combine the client and the server to examine and test the
results. At the end of the Chapter, the lesson debriefs the case study. I bet you can't
wait to start!
Trainers agree that you must use the information and knowledge you gain
during a course to truly lock it into long-term memory. You must apply the knowledge
you learn to become proficient; in other words, true mastery comes only with practice.
You have chosen to learn Visual InterDev by working through this guide, so I would
be remiss if I didn't give you a way to apply the knowledge before you tackle your
real-world applications. During this lesson, you get to apply your knowledge and
determine how much you have learned. If you discover that you need to brush up on
some concept, feel free to refer to the lesson on that topic. This final examination
is an open guide test.
This case study involves developing an intranet application for Publishers' Paradise.
As mentioned, Publishers' Paradise is one of the largest publishing conglomerates
in the country. It owns several companies that publish many different types of guides.
This case study is a hypothetical situation, but it's meant to demonstrate the possibilities
for Web-based applications. This section reviews the application so you will understand the final product.
This application is targeted at managers who are responsible for monitoring the progress
and sales of guides. At its core, the application enables a manager to track the sales
of a company's guides. The manager can also view a list of current titles and their
prices. Publishers' Paradise is known for its reliability and impeccable service,
which is made possible, in part, by this application.
The Publishers' Paradise intranet application uses several different client components,
including HTML web pages, scripting code, images, ActiveX controls, and music. You
will be using all these components to construct the client portion of the application.
Some of these pieces are given to you as part of the lesson, and others you create
from scratch. Again, the goal is to reinforce your learning over the past three weeks.
The first step of this case study is to create the HTML web pages that house the
application's other client components. Table 21.1 lists and describes the three HTML
web pages in the application.
The following sections evaluate each of these web pages.
This page is the first, or default, page of the application. Figure 21.1 displays
this page's layout. From this page, a manager can navigate to any of the other web pages in the application.
To construct this page, you need to open the web page called Default.asp that's in
the PubParadise project with the FrontPage Editor for Visual InterDev. This file
provides a shell you can use to further develop the web page. Once you open the file,
your screen should look like the one shown in Figure 21.2. Next, you need to create the hyperlinks for the other pages that can be accessed
from this page. The names of these files were given in Table 21.1, and the files
are included as part of the PubParadise project. You can easily incorporate hyperlinks
to these files by using the FrontPage Editor. The default page. Opening the page with the FrontPage Editor.
Choosing a hyperlink. When you have finished inserting the hyperlinks, your default web page should
resemble the page shown in Figure 21.4. The links revealed. The next task is to spice up the look and behavior of this page so it seems more
hospitable to the user. The PubParadise project has a GIF image and a MIDI sound
file you can use to jazz up the page. You need to use the FrontPage Editor to insert
the image in the top-right corner of the default page. You should insert the MIDI
file as a background sound.
The default page still has something missing. You need to insert the page's title
and purpose, as well as a horizontal line between the header and the body of the
web page. After you finish this final task, your web page should look like the one
in Figure 21.5. In a few steps, you have constructed the application's default page. The FrontPage
Editor helped you construct the web page without worrying about the underlying HTML.
Listing 21.1 shows you the HTML created so far, based on your design.
The completed default page. This code uses hyperlinks to serve as the main link to the other areas of the
application. This page also has background music that plays when the user first gets
to this page. The music is a MIDI file created with the Music Producer, and the image
is a GIF file designed with the Image Composer.
This web page has news updates for Publishers' Paradise employees; its contents
have already been developed, as shown in Figure 21.6. The News page: Life in Paradise. As you can see, this page offers several brief company articles; it's updated
daily by the marketing department.
The Reports page displays a hyperlink list of all the available reports for the
application. These links are associated with their respective Active Server Pages
(ASPs), which retrieve the necessary information from the database and display it
in a report format. Some of these reports consist of tables, and other reports display
the information in a graph. This page has also been created for you as part of the
PubParadise project and is displayed in Figure 21.7. The Reports page.
Now that you have constructed the client portion of the application, it's time
to build the server components, which include ASPs and database integration. Table
21.2 lists the ASPs included with the application.
The following sections present and explain these ASPs.
The Titles ASP enables you to view all the available guides published by Publishers'
Paradise. You construct this page by using the Titles.asp file contained in the project.
This file is just a shell into which you insert the design-time controls for building
the database query and table. You can then add the logic to display the information
in the table.
The first step to creating the Titles ASP is to insert the Data Range Header and
Footer controls. You can choose between two methods to insert these controls. Can
you remember what those methods are? Refer back to Chapter 14, "Extending Web Pages
Through Design-Time Controls," for a reminder. During this process, you must make some choices about the kind of data you want
to retrieve and how you want to format it. Table 21.3 lists the values that you should
choose for the Data Range Header control.
After you establish these values for the properties, you need to build an SQL
statement that will retrieve the Title, Type, PubDate, Price, and YTD_Sales columns
from the Titles table. If you need help constructing the query, refer to the lesson
on Chapter 9, "Using the Visual Data Tools for Maximum Productivity." After
you build the query and return to the Properties window for the Data Range Header
control, you need to copy all the fields you're selecting from the Titles table.
You can do this by clicking the Copy Fields button.
Now that you have inserted the proper design-time controls to retrieve the data,
you're ready to insert some logic to properly format the results in a table. The
following lines of code need to be inserted between the Data Range Header and Footer
controls: This code example writes the individual data fields into their respective table
columns for each row that's returned. The FormatCurrency function is used
to format the Price field to display values with a dollar sign and two decimals.
You also need to define the table width and border by entering the following lines
of code at the beginning of the body section, just before the declaration for the
Data Range Header control: After you have entered this code, your ASP file's contents should resemble the
code in Listing 21.2.
You can preview the results by browsing the ASP web page, as illustrated in Figure
21.8. Viewing the titles.
You also need to create the ASP to process the Sales report for the application.
This report displays the year-to-date sales for the different types of guides published
by Publishers' Paradise. The ASP for this report is named Sales.asp and is located
in the PubParadise project. First, you need to open the ASP and insert the Data Range Header and Footer controls
into the ASP. Next, create a query that retrieves the Type column and totals the
Ytd_Sales column. The following code shows what your SQL statement should look like: You should practice using the Query Designer to construct this query instead of
typing the SQL statement directly. After you insert the Data Range Header and Footer
controls, insert the following lines of code between the Data Range Header and Footer
controls: In this code example, the FormatCurrency function is used to format the
Total Sales column with a dollar sign and a comma separator. Notice the other method
to refer to the second column that's returned from the database. You can access a
column by referring to it either by name or by its index number. You also need to insert the following lines of code at the top of the body section: After you finish these tasks, your final ASP should contain the code in Listing
21.3.
With the code in this listing, the ASP produces a web page similar to the one
in Figure 21.9. Viewing the sales.
You have now developed both the client and server portions of the application.
I think you can see how these different components integrate to form a whole application.
The HTML web pages in this example are used to display document and content information,
supply links to other parts of the application, and provide the main default page
for the application. The ASPs are used to display dynamic content that includes database
integration. Given the powerful capabilities of Active Server Pages, you should use
more of these pages in your future Web-based applications. I think you will see ASPs
overtaking HTML pages in the not-too-distant future. The strength of ASPs comes from
their ability to generate both HTML and client- and server-side script. The lesson also demonstrates how to integrate database information into your application.
The examples show you how to connect to the database, create the query, and then
format the information in your web page. Try running the application now to get a
feel for how the whole application works. Figures 21.10 through 21.14 illustrate
the contents of the Publishers' Paradise application. The default page. The latest news. Choosing a report. Reviewing the titles. Reviewing the sales.
ToChapter's lesson has demonstrated how the different components of a Visual InterDev
project combine to form a Web-based application. The lesson should have given you
the opportunity to apply the knowledge you gained over the past three weeks. How
did you do? Were you able to recall the previous lessons you learned? You should
now understand that the lessons of the past three weeks didn't focus on technology
for technology's sake. Although the new and powerful technologies of the Web are
technically cool, they have a more important mission as the critical tool to create
the businesses of the future, as you learned in toChapter's lesson. The first part of the lesson gave you an overview of the Publishers' Paradise
application. Next, the client components of the application were explained, and you
were given a chance to test your knowledge by developing these components. Then the
lesson proceeded to the server side of the equation. You were able to develop some
ASP files and integrate them with a database to create a useful report. The final
lesson for the Chapter debriefed the case study and illustrated the pages in the application. It will be interesting to see which technologies come out on top. Will it be ActiveX
or Java applets? HTML or ASP? Whatever the outcome, you can count on Visual InterDev
to support the winners!
For the final workshop of this three-week journey, you should develop more web
pages for the Publishers' Paradise application. You can use any of the tables in
the Pubs database to support these pages. Try focusing on the concepts you might
not understand as well as others. For example, you might want to create more images
for the web pages, using the Image Composer to understand its capabilities. You also
should practice using ASPs to deliver dynamic content from database tables. You can
examine the tables and create added functions and features for the application, based
on the information in the database.
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