ASP in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Comments/Troubleshooting

There are several small "gotchas" that I've learned the hard way when using ADO with ASP. I detail these later in this chapter when discussing the particular properties or methods that caused the problems. The only comment I have on ADO is this: When you begin to write your ASP database application, take some time to delve deeper into ADO. There are several more advanced topics in ADO that I do not cover here.

Once you find out how to use ADO to perform the functions you want, take time to look at your specific data provider and at what parts of ADO are supported. Does it support all the cursor types that you need? Does ADO support all the functionality you need? Are there properties of ADO that you cannot use because your data provider does not provide them, or, more likely, does your data provider provide functionality that ADO does not support?

The answers to these questions and the research that goes into to finding them can save you a great deal of time during development. This may seem self-evident, but it is extremely important — especially when deciding whether to use ADO. Though ADO has improved a great deal since its release, it is still young. Although Microsoft has poised OLE DB and its automation wrapper, ADO, to take the data access spotlight, it has only recently released ADO. As a result, ADO still has some maturing to do.

One final note: Microsoft has recently released for public download an unsupported HTML Table component that will allow ...