Dynamic Lists

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine about the best use of JSP tools this weekend, in particular JSP Tag Libraries (http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/taglibraries.html).

It came to mind that I should really look over my ASP to find areas where something like this would be useful. I found one right away.

On every page I, somewhere on the page, I am bound to make a list from a recordset (OK, so maybe this is a little inefficient, but...). While I don't have the neat and tidy sytax of JSP Tag Libraries, there is nothing stopping me from using a function and passing in a string (versus using an html like syntax).


[tt][color green]
'*** HTMLRepeater *************************************************************
'*
'* Desc: Repeats a given HTML string for each record in a recordset,
'* ^^^^ replacing identifier tags with values from the records.
'*
'* Input: Valid HTML string to be repeated.
'* ^^^^^ Recordset to pull data from.
'*
'* Output: none
'* ^^^^^^
'*
'* Usage: The html string should contain tags of the format <?FieldName?>.
'* ^^^^^ Every occurance of this tag will be replaced with the value in the
'* current record which corresponds to the specified field.
'*
'******************************************************************************[/color]
public sub htmlRepeater(html, sql)
dim rsRepeat
dim outStr
dim fld
dim arrVal()
dim curVal
dim numVal

numVal = 0

set rsRepeat = server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")
rsRepeat.CursorLocation = ADODB.adUseClient
rsRepeat.Open sql, Application("cnnStr"),adOpenKeyset,adLockReadOnly,ADODB.adcmdtext
set rsRepeat.ActiveConnection = nothing

'parse the html string to find all variable tags
outStr = html
curVal = 1
while(curVal > 0)
'find the start of the first variable
curVal = len(outStr) - instr(1,outStr,"<?")-1
'cut everything else away
outStr = right(outStr,curVal)
'find the end of the variable
curVal = instr(1,outStr,"?>")-1
if(curVal > 0)then
'add another element to the array
numVal = numVal + 1
redim preserve arrVal(numVal)
'assign the variable to field list
arrVal(numVal-1) = left(outStr, curVal )
'cut away the variable
outStr = right(outStr,len(outStr) - curVal)
end if
wend

'display the html for each record
while (not rsRepeat.EOF)
outStr = html
'replace each variable tag with corresponding field
for curVal = 0 to numVal-1
outStr = replace(outStr,"<?" & arrVal(curVal) & "?>", rsRepeat(arrVal(curVal)).value)
next
Response.Write(outStr)
rsRepeat.movenext
wend

rsRepeat.Close
set rsRepeat = nothing

end sub[color green]
'******************************************************************************[/color]
[/tt]
An example of this would be a situation where you have a list of provinces and want to create a select list from this list of provinces (I'm Canadian, so you are getting Canadian provinces):

Output:
This is not limited to only select lists. Because the formatting is defined for each call, you could use this for the formatting of any recordset data for web display.