Question

Lets say I have three webpages – one for big cars, one for middle sized cars, and one for little cars.

Each page is almost identical and consists of a form where you can select to filter a list of cars by colour etc and a submit button. On the client side the only difference is the title.

On the server side the only difference is in the where clause, for example:

... where car_type = "big" and color = %s, Response.Form['color']

But how can I save myself creating three different asp scripts for each page? How do I pass around which car_type I have?

I was thinking maybe by using a query string, but the query string data will be lost when the user presses the submit button.

Thanks,

Barry

Answer 1

You’ve found one solution yourself. Might not be the best one, though. When programming you always want to minimize redundancy, to avoid code duplication, because it’ll invariably become a maintenance hassle, if not nightmare. So you really want to avoid creating three identical pages with just a tiny parameter difference.

Why don’t you simply create one single page containing a select menu for the type of vehicle to search for? You could attach an onselect handler using Javascript to that menu which would reload the page if that’s necessary. (And it might not even be.) In some menu, you could have links pointing to this page (search.asp or whatever) containing the vehicle type like this:

• search.asp?type=L
• search.asp?type=M
• search.asp?type=S

Just an idea. Toy around with the code and that way you’ll learn a lot. ASP is an old technology but I think a very good one for learning web applications. Do read the docs to learn about the facilities it affords you to avoid duplicating code. Here’s a collection of things I found useful.