Generating Static Pages To Post To The Web

Generating Static Pages To Post To The Web ?

This method is worth knowing as it allows you to make the leap to a more dynamic web site without investing in backend server technologies such as Active Server Pages

Local Database Software generates web pages locally Publish pages to the web

This solution is suited to a web site whose online content does not changed very often and one that does not require user queries of the database. It will generally produce a hierarchy of html pages and can be made more versatile by adding a search solution to the site. Will allow far more freedom in the generation of the web pages. This means you can use cheaper and simpler web hosting facilities and feature your html pages in the giant keyword engines such as Altavista

Posting Pages To The Web

First of all you need to design the output that you want to achieve in a HTML editor such as FrontPage. Keep the layout clean and consistent with the kind of output that you would expect from a simple access report. Once the page layout has been approved by your users, you then can import the form as HTML code into an Access module and make the HTML using print commands. It is quite important to get quite close to the final design as this sort of software is hard to change once in place.

For this example, we are going to build a series of HTML pages that display the product code, the picture and the description of the product. The first step is to loop through the records that you want to make individual HTML pages for.

Open the dbweb.mdb file in the download zip file

The code for this exercisecan be found in the form "FX_MakeHtml" in the demo database.

Now run the application and produce a few simple forms using Visual Basic Code as follows.

Set mydb = CurrentDb
que = "SELECT CategoryName, Description FROM Categories;"
Set catRst = mydb.OpenRecordset(que)
catRst.MoveFirst
Do Until catRst.EOF

DoCmd.Echo True, catRst!CategoryName & catRst!Description
' Output the new html file

Call makeHtmlPage(catRst!CategoryName, catRst!Description)

catRst.MoveNext
Loop
catRst.Close

The meat of this solution is the MakeHtmlPage subroutine. At this stage it is critical to have decided the layout of the HTML because if you have to start altering the VB code that makes the page, it is going to waste a lot of your time. To export the HTML use the VB utilities that allow you to open and make text files. The Access statements that I use are Open, Print, Close and FreeFile. If you are unaware of FreeFile, this function returns the next available integer number that can be used by the Open statement. I call the HTML files by their actually product name as this is a unique index.

exportdir = "c:\My Documents\"
fNum = FreeFile
fName = exportdir & LCase(productStr) & ".htm"
Open fName For Output As #fNum

Now you need to write the HTML using the Print command. At this stage you will cut and paste your HTML into the module. Before you get carried away and start embedding the record set variables into the print statements, make sure that the HTML is working. The HTML language uses quotes in great abundance so it is time to start deploying the double double quotes or the single and double quote combinations to export what HTML wants to see. If you are unsure on this area, Open Access help and type Quotes. Look for Quotation Marks in Strings help. As an example, the HTML command for a background color of white is BGCOLOR="#ffffff" and in the Print statement you need to write BGCOLOR=""#ffffff"".

Print #fNum, "<html>"
Print #fNum, "<head>"
Print #fNum, "<title>" & productStr & " </title>"
Print #fNum, "</head>"
Print #fNum, "<body BGCOLOR=""#ffffff""> "
Print #fNum, "" & productStr & _ " "

Print #fNum, "<img src=""images/" & _
productStr & ".gif"" alt=""Product Picture"" "

Print #fNum, "" & _
DescriptionStr & ""

Print #fNum, " </body></html>"

Close fNum

To embed your recordset information into the HTML, remove the test text that came with your initial HTML page and replace it with your recordset variables ( ProductStr and DescriptionStr ). For this example, the external image file is defined in the HTML by <img src=> is located in the /images directory and stored using the same name as the unique product name. So that’s how you can generate multiple HTML files from your database. You will probably need to generate a page that provides links to these separate pages in the function that loops through the recordset.

Background Material: Automating The Process Still Further

Posting these files to the internet automatically can probably be undertaken in a number of ways but the technique that I have devised will work on Windows 95 and uses a DOS for Windows 95 utilities called FTP (surprise surprise). So open your DOS window from within Windows and type FTP. You may then want to type Help to get a list of the commands. The idea here is to build the FTP script file using the Access Print statement and then to run the script using a DOS batch command or an Access shell command. Following is the FTP script that you could generate to post the files to the Web.

open
yourFTP_Username
yourPassword
cd public_html
dir
put c:\my documents\beverages.htm
put c:\my documents\condiments.html
quit

To automate the process, you need to run a shell command as a macro or as a VB script as follows

Call Shell("ftp -s:c:\my documents\products.ftp", 1)

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Published 1999-05