ASP in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Comments/Troubleshooting

There are currently two very important limitations in constructing transactional scripts:

• Only database actions are supported, and only SQL Server and databases that support the XA protocol are supported by COM+ Component Services or MTS.

• A transaction cannot span more than one ASP page. For this reason, you must be very careful in creating your pages: they must include all the actions required by your transactions but not be so large as to slow the processing of the page by too large a percentage.

If you write your own server components that complete some or all of the database actions in your transaction, that component must be registered in an MTS package.^[1] MTS transactional support is provided only if the component is registered. What's more, you should create your own library packages and not include your component in the IIS in-process package. Custom library packages can be used by multiple ASP applications and are run in the same process as the ASP DLL. Setting up library packages also gives your component the ability to be pooled for reuse by your applications. This pooling is managed by MTS as well. You also can add your components to a server package, but doing so is required only for role-based transactions or transactions running on remote computers.

Note that you should not give objects functioning in transactions session- or application-level scope, since transactional objects are deactivated at the end of their transaction. If you do ...