ASP Components
An ASP Server Component is a collection of code that has been made by Microsoft (advanced users can also create their own components), and included in IIS.
With the use of ASP you can unlock the power of this pre-made code.
These objects can be used
to do a ton of things, such as: an easy-to-use ad rotation service, an interface to a database, a means
of manipulating files and much more.
Using ASP Components
Making use of Microsoft's ASP Components in your ASP programming will allow you to do
so much with ASP that you'll be kicking yourself for not using components earlier.
You can access these built in components by creating objects of them. See
our previous lesson if you need a refresher on what ASP Objects are.
In this lesson we will be utilizing Microsoft's FileSystem Component to display
all the files in our current directory. The first thing we need to do is to create
a FileSystem object so we can use all the properties and methods that are in this component.
Note: FSO stands for File System Object in this example.
tizagComponent.asp ASP Code:
<%
Dim myFSO
Set myFSO = _
Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set myFSO = nothing
%>
Accessing an ASP Component's Features
Once you have created an object of your desired component you can access all the
methods and variables of that component. We have created an instance of the File System Component and stored it
into myFSO. We need the folder that we're going to list all the files of and the GetFolder method of our FSO will
do the job.
Using the same directory we decided to use back in the Running ASP lesson
we are going to set the path of this FSO to "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\tizagASP\", the
same directory that "tizagComponent.asp" was saved in.
Updated tizagComponent.asp ASP Code:
<%
Dim myFSO, myFolder
Set myFSO = _
Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set myFolder = _myFSO.GetFolder("C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\tizagASP")
Response.Write("Current folder is: " & myFolder.Name)
Set myFolder = nothing
Set myFSO = nothing
%>
Display:
Current folder is: tizagASP
Finishing Up
The last thing on our to-do list is to get access to the names of the files
in our working directory. The Folder object contains a method that returns a collection
of all the files in the current directory. The code for accessing this collection and displaying the filenames is in the example below.
Updated tizagComponent.asp ASP Code:
<%
Dim myFSO, myFolder
Set myFSO = _
Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set myFolder = _myFSO.GetFolder("C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\tizagASP")
Response.Write("Current folder is: " & myFolder.Name)
For Each fileItem In myFolder.Files
Response.Write("<br />" & fileItem.Name)
Next
Set myFolder = nothing
Set myFSO = nothing
%>
If you have done every example in this ASP Tutorial your web page produced
would look like this. Notice that the files are automatically sorted alphabetically!
Display:
firtscript.asp
tizagComponent.asp
tizagEmail.asp
tizagForm.html
tizagGet.asp
tizagPost.asp
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