Page 255 - DCAP408_WEB_PROGRAMMING

Unit 10: Working with Response Object

the databases intelligent to decision makers in an organisation. The result of a successful Notes
implementation of the two can be a report in form of charts and graphs on the effectiveness
of the latest marketing campaign available online to top management.
While the scope of data mining and warehousing is vast, this article will be restricted to
the importance of data warehousing and the subsequent ones will deal with techniques to
using the technology and products available in the market.
In the old economy, data would have been stored at best in a tabular form to be accessed
by the a few persons in the organisation. A software program written specially for that
organisation to display that information on to the computer screen was common. However,
now with the Internet using hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP _ the same technology that
helps you surf the Net by clicking on links) to access and transfer data, the old way of
storing data is of little use.
The data has to be stored in a way that it can be read by active server pages or Java
programs. What active server pages do is to take a request made by a client, process it,
access the database, collect the relevant information and send the reply back t o the client.
The client in most cases is a person using a browser and submitting a request for say, the
last quarter’s sales report.
For a Net enterprise, it is important to configure the databases so that clients can access them
remotely over the Net. For instance, in a business-to-business transaction, suppliers would
like to access inventory levels of their clients to initiate supp ly of goods and bills. Or borrowers
might want to access account information through the Net. In a legacy system where there is
little connectivity, access was limited to a few people. Now to be connected on the Net the old
data has to be marked up in say extensible markup language (XML) so that it can be easily
accessed.Repackaging the data into modern databases is the most challenging aspect of
warehousing. New enterprises should begin using modern databases at the first instance. On
a very small scale MS Access, the database that comes with Microsoft Office 97, is a good
example. However, for large enterprises much bigger databases are needed.
Old enterprises might have to go through the painful process of using data entry operators
to re-input all the data in a Net-accessible format. This is much easier if data is stored in a
tabular form. Plus for large organisations say like the State Bank of India, collecting data
from all the branches and putting it all into one format will be a large-scale, costly operation.

This, however, cannot be a deterrent if one wants to compete or survive on the Net.
Clients will soon demand access to the information from databases. This will be information
pertaining to the client itself on which day-to-day business decisions will be made. If an
enterprise is not able to provide it on the very convenient medium of the Internet, it might
lose the client to a Net-savvy competitor.

10.5 Summary

 The response object is one of the five built-in ASP objects. Response is used to send output
to the client. This output might be text displayed in a browser window, cookie data or it
might have to do with how your pages are sent to the client and stored.
 The most common use of the Response object is to send data to the client’s Web browser to
be displayed as part of a Web page. It is done in two ways. The first is to use the Write
method; the other is to use the shortcut < %=_%>.

 The most important thing in using Response. Write is that the string being written cannot
contain “%>”. If you need to write a string that contains “%>”, use “%\>”. Since we use %>
to indicate the end of a block of ASP code, putting it in your strings will confuse the system.

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