Designing Active Server Pages

Creating Reusable Administration Pages

In our quest to build a set of truly reusable administration page generation scripts, there are three general problems we’ll encounter and have to solve:

• How does one gather table and column information, and what specific table and column information is worth noting?

• How does one create easy-to-use forms for inserting, editing, and deleting records in a database table? How can the information collected about the database tables and columns be used to create easier-to-use administration page forms?

• Once the user submits an administration page form, how will the changes find their way into the database?

These questions are fairly easy to answer when one is given the liberty to create a set of administration pages for each and every database table, but when we limit ourselves to only a small set of generic administration pages, regardless of the number of database tables, these questions quickly become much more difficult to answer.

The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to answering these questions. The following sections each focus on answering a particular question:

• Section 6.3.2 answers the question, “How does one gather column information?”

• Section 6.3.3 answers the question, “How does one gather table information?”

• Section 6.3.4 answers the question, “How can the information collected about the database tables and columns be used to create easier-to-use administration page forms?”

• Section 6.3.5 answers the question, “How does one create easy-to-use ...