Appendix A. Designing ASP Forms
This section provides an example of an ASP Form and the HTML that it creates for the user. To fully understand this section, you should have a good understanding of HTML4, or read the section in conjunction with an HTML4 manual.
Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) supports server-side scripting in Web pages. With server-side scripting, instead of fetching a Web page and returning it to a browser, the web server examines the contents of a page and executes any server-side scripting included in the Active Server Page (ASP). ASPs build and alter their HTML dynamically, sending back customized simple pages to the user.
The advantage of ASPs is that the Web browser does not necessarily need to support scripting, applets or COM controls. For example, the Web server can retrieve the customer data from the Agile Business Suite System and use it dynamically to build an HTML page and send it back to the user. In this case, the Component Enabler environment and components are run on the Web server and accessed as components from the scripts running on the same server.
The following figure shows this process.
This approach provides wide compatibility for users planning to offer public Web access to selected Agile Business Suite Systems. Running the Component Enabler interface on the Web server and only sending HTML, makes it easier to overcome the limitations of some Web browsers and allows pages to be more generally accessible on the Web.
This example first describes the HTML Form that you wish the user to see. Then it describes the ASP Form that you would need to design to create the HTML Form.
Note: The type of HTML you produce depends on the browser that you are using. For example, the document object model used by the Internet Explorer browser is different from the model used by Chrome. Therefore, the VBScript that you use to create the HTML also needs to be different. If you can restrict your applications to one type of browser, you can avoid the conditional processing that you need to support different browser types
If you need to support multiple browser types, first develop and test your ASP Form using one browser, then test it using the other browsers you support. You can use conditional code in your script to make any modifications you need to produce the HTML Form you require for the other browsers.
The ASP Generator tries to cover the largest range of browsers that conform to the HTML4 specification. However, there is no way to determine the font size that a system, on which the browser is running, has been setup to use.
If you need to support clients who might be using either large, small, or custom fonts you must design the form to display correctly with large fonts. Then any system which is setup to use small, or custom fonts also display the form correctly in the browser.