I’ve been working with an ASP Classic site with over 500 files, some of which aren’t used and some of which are; along with a database with hundreds of procs and functions and tables, in the same shape.
I need a way to get a grip on the project so I can eventually migrate it. I don’t have time yet to walk through every single page and look at the SQL (stored procedures are in the database and are called properly within the ASP pages), so I’m at a loss as to how to get a handle on this.
My immediate thought is to make ASP classes and put them into the pages as I go – they’d pretty much be used for getting and setting fields, validation, and sending recordsets into display functions.
Is this a reasonable approach? Am I missing some strategy?
How would you approach this? A migration to another platform at this point is considered, but not feasible for the short term (next couple of months)
My simple advice is stop think about code. Spend more time with the UI actually using it and spend time examining in detail the database schema.
Edit
If you are trying to determine what pages are active then use IIS logging to harvest distinct pages hit. Also do some scripting to collect the names of files and text search the files in the site looking for any occurance of those files. This info should identify parts of the site that are rarely used or dead.
However in all probability there will considerable content in the “active” files which are also dead. Let me re-iterate do not actually to add classes or refactor the code at this stage you should concentrate on understanding what it does not how it does it. Understanding the DB Schema is a vital step and then understanding what UI interactions bring about specific changes in the DB.