Using the Information Obtained From the User

Forms do a fine job of gathering information from the user and passing it to ASP, along with a request for a new ASP page. But how can the new ASP page use that information? We need to place that information in a holding tank and then have a way to use it in our ASP code.

In this section, we're going to show how ASP holds the incoming information at two levels. First, any information from the form is passed to the new ASP page and is automatically captured and held by ASP in its Request object. Second, we can write code in our script to harvest the information from the Request object, and put it into a script variable. In any programming language, variables can be used to store, test and manipulate information.

Chapter 4  explains in detail the subtleties of variable types and duration, and Chapter 7 will talk about the Request object in depth. But for now we'll look at the quick and dirty technique – a brief overview of variables.