ASP/VBScript Parser? 1

[Hondy]

Hi

Anyone know if there's any application out there that will display ASP pages so I can see the table layouts?

I have a page that is a form and outputs the results, the thing is the tables are created dynamically by the VBScript but appear messed up. If I correct it in one area it brakes another.

Is there a better way to view the table structure than using a text editor? Dreamweaver can't show me the tables because they aren't built yet so I'm having to trawl through code to sort out the table rows etc.

Any pointers?

Thanks

 

[BabyJeffy]

nyone know if there's any application out there that will display ASP pages so I can see the table layouts?

Firefox, Netscape and Opera will all do this (I think there is a Microsoft specific program out there as well).

Seriously though... view the page in a browser and then choose "View source" to view the client-side rendered source code. Now copy all that into a text file and save it as .html file. You can now open that file with Dreamweaver and you will be able to see the table layouts. You won't be able to change them - but you will be able to start the fixing process by seeing what is broken.

Repeat until you have the desired layout.

Cheers,
Jeff

[tt]Jeff's Page [/tt][tt]@[/tt][tt] Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/jeff/

[/tt]

 

[Hondy]

argh i guess i deserved that

Yes, the source view is probably the best method, I just wondered if there are any clever tools out there for checking the flow of an ASP script?

Do you all do it in a text document??

Thanks

 

[BabyJeffy]

Do you all do it in a text document?

Yes... I use TextPad (

http://www.textpad.com)

when working on Windows and TextWrangler (

http://www.barebones.com)

when on MacOSX.

I find that most of the time I'm doing find/replace or looking for a tag that has been missed. The syntax colourisation helps me identify badly formatted syntax - and both allow the use of regular expressions for search/replace.

I know the process of view source/copy into a text area etc is tedious... there are some things you can do to make this easier however. If you are using IE then there is a registry patch (I googled it initially) you can apply to set the default "view source" to use another text editor rather than the default Notepad. If you are using FF (which is a great dev tool with all the dev extensions etc) there is an extension that lets you choose the application to handle "view source". The end result is that you can bypass the copy/paste tedium and get right into debugging.

I can't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to configure something like Dreamweaver to be the default program to handle "view source" either. You could then toggle into WYSIWYG mode and actually see what the tables are doing (and flip back into code mode to make changes). This process may be more useful to you - depends what tools you are using and how well you know them I guess.

Hope that's all been of some help,
Jeff

[tt]Jeff's Page [/tt][tt]@[/tt][tt] Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/jeff/

[/tt]

 

[Hondy]

Thanks for the info, I'll try the textpad.

I was hoping that there was some great application that I didn't know about to get a preview of the pages - maybe not!

Thanks for the advice

 

[Fendal]

If you have XP pro you can install iis and run ASP locally (

http://127.0.0.1/http://localhost)