Beginning Active Server Pages

Another great thing with ASP is you are not limited to simply VB - you can 'hard-code' HTML too. Take a look at this example:

What this code does is display some text in a HTML table. If the variable bTest is true (which, in this instance is the case), sVariable is placed in between the <td> and </td> tags. Otherwise, sName is outputted there instead. Not sure exactly what is happening? Take a look in your browser. Then, right click and select View Source. What you should see is this:

<table border="1">
  <tr><td>hello James</td></tr>
</table>

Another useful feature is that If...Then...Else statements don't only apply to Visual Basic. You can use them to selectively output existing HTML. Let's convert a previous example to using this syntax:

which does exactly the same thing. You might also find you want to simply output the value of a variable into some hard coded HTML. ASP provides a function for this too. Instead of using the <% and %> tags, use <%=VariableName%>. For example,

would insert the value of sName into the HTML, and is the same as

One final thing before we move on... When using the Response.Write statement you might find you want to include a quote (") within the string. You can do this in two ways. Either use the Chr(32) statement:

or simply replace the single quote with a double quote:

I'll leave it up to you to decide which is more elegant!