ASP in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

The Visual Basic CGI Application

I wrote the second CGI application using Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0. I used O'Reilly's Windows CGI framework for Visual Basic Programmers (which comes with O'Reilly's WebSite Pro 2.0), which is defined by the CGI32.BAS code module. This code module does much of the CGI work for you by retrieving all of the CGI environment variables (among other things) from the temporary file created on the server when the user submits the HTML form. For more information on the WinCGI specification or on O'Reilly's CGI framework for Visual Basic programmers, see the "Creating Dynamic Content" section of the documentation for WebSite Pro 2.0. For more information on CGI variables (and their mapping to ASP variables), see the second half of this appendix.

Example 2.3 shows the Visual Basic code for our CGI application.

Example B.3. The Visual Basic Version of the CGI Script

' +-------------------------------------+ ' | Force variable declarations. | ' +-------------------------------------+ Option Explicit Sub Inter_Main( ) ' +-------------------------------------+ ' | If a user of the web server machine | ' | inadvertently attempts to run | ' | this program as a standalone | ' | application, let them know it is a | ' | CGI app. | ' +-------------------------------------+ MsgBox "This is a Windows CGI program." End Sub Sub CGI_Main( ) ' +-------------------------------------+ ' | Local variable declarations. | ' +-------------------------------------+ Dim strUserName ...