10.0.0- The Scripting Objects

The Scripting Objects

In the last few chapters, we have been looking at some of the different objects that can be used with Active Server Pages. These objects, such as the Application and Session objects, are built-in to Active Server Pages. We have mentioned in previous chapters that there are also objects on the client-side that are built into the scripting language. As ASP utilizes scripting languages to access its own built-in objects, it stands to reason that you should, in ASP, be able to use the built in objects provided by VBScript, Jscript, or the different objects that come free with libraries distributed as part of IIS 5.0, and indeed you can.

These objects do not directly deal with the communication between the client and the web server, as the built-in objects do. These objects provide additional functionality to the scripting language itself. This is why they are known as the scripting objects. The scripting objects add some important features to ASP, such as the Dictionary object and the RegExp object. The Dictionary object allows you to store and index data about your application, in a manner similar to a dictionary, and the RegExp object allows you to search for multiple occurrences of a sequence of characters within a large volume of text.

In this chapter we'll look at:

• The Dictionary object
• The FileSystemObject object
• Collections of the FileSystemObject object
• Server-side includes
• The TextStream object
• The RegExp object

But first, let's look in more detail at what exactly the scripting objects are.