Database Wizardry with FrontPage 2000
By William F. Slater III
Web-database applications are important for many reasons. Besides the ease of updating and querying your data, they've become the foundation of most e-commerce applications. Unfortunately, for many of today's Web professionals, creating sophisticated databases is still a challenge.
With each new release of Microsoft FrontPage, there are more and more features to help nonprogrammers develop Web sites. One of the more interesting features of the Office 2000 suite lets you easily build a Web-based database application without coding. You can now develop a simple database with Microsoft Access, use a wizard to easily integrate it into your Web site, and then use FrontPage to create a Web site that can use this database. The feature is called the Database Results Wizard. This article will describe how to create such an application using Access, FrontPage, ODBC, Personal Web Server with ASP middleware configured, a browser, and a few very basic SQL statements. I'll also describe the process for getting such an application installed at your favorite ISP.
This is a Web-based name- and email-list collection application. When users view the index.htm file in the root directory they're presented with two hyperlinks that let them either enter a record or view existing records. If they choose to enter a record with their name and email address, they click on that hyperlink, then enter that information from a form. Submitting the form will invoke a routine written in VBScript with SQL that will store the data into a database table.
