Part 3 - Building a Registration Database
October 16, 2000
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If you have been following along in this series and read about how to
use Microsoft Active Server Pages to make your
forms functional, interactive,
smart and valid,
then the next logical step is to do something a little more permanent
with the data. Sending an email is fine, but if you are building
something like an online registration database for internal marketing
purposes or for allowing repeat access to features on your site, then
you'll need to put that data in a database.
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To follow along in this article, you will need to have a thorough
understanding of the techniques discussed in the
two other articles in this series.
You will also need access to some type of ODBC (Open Database
Connectivity) compliant database package. I will be using Microsoft
Access 2000 on Windows 98, but you can use Windows 2000/NT/9x if you
so choose.
The Scenario
Before delving right into the meat of this topic, it is important to
define a framework within which we will be working. Technology is
best used as a means to an end, so we will develop a working and
practical (albeit small) registration system. This registration
system will collect demographic information about the site visitor,
as well as a username and password they select, so they may access
subscription based services on your site.
An example can be seen on
Enfused's Registration Page, although we won't go into so much
detail. We are also going to assume that you don't need some detailed
registration agreement, which you can easily implement at another time.
Read the contents of that page, or just skip and click "I AGREE" and
you will see the front-end of what we will be recreating on a generic
basis.
In addition, please go back to the article on form-field validation
and grab the
code on the
final page, we will be building off of that page to complete our
registration system.
Note: If you want to save time, I have
prepared a zip file including the database and files we will be working
with. You can
download it now and just follow along if you want.
Contents:
Finalizing the Form
Web Databases 101
ADO is Our Friend
SQL and Recordsets
Writing the Data to the Database
Conclusion
Part 3 - Building a Registration Database
Finalizing the Form
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