Designing Active Server Pages

The Building Blocks for Creating Reusable Administration Pages

The biggest challenge in creating truly reusable administration pages arrives when dealing with complex database tables. Imagine, for a moment, that all our tables were simple database tables that don’t impose foreign key constraints upon other tables, and have no foreign key constraints imposed upon them (that is, a simple database table is one that has no explicit relationships with other tables). Rarely are there many simple database tables in a database. Since relational databases inherently encourage the developer to create several small, related tables, simple database tables are found only in simple data models. Therefore, we need a system that gracefully handles complex tables as well as simple tables.

In this section we’ll examine the theory behind creating powerful, reusable database administration pages that can be used for complex tables. We’ll begin with a discussion of what the ideal reusable administration page should contain. Since the reusable administration pages we’ll later create will make heavy use of ADO schemas, an entire section is dedicated to this topic.

The Ideal Reusable Administration Page Script

Without code reuse, a developer needs to perform seven steps for each administration page. With code reuse, however, the need to repeat each of the seven steps for each administration page can be eliminated. Can code reuse help to eliminate the fact that seven steps are needed, though? The ideal situation ...