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More and more Web sites these days are database-driven. That means that most of the content, customer data, site statistics and maybe even information used for the navigation menu or other layout purposes is stored in a database.

With all that data stored in a database, you also need to provide a means to let your users search for it in the database. Since this information is not file based, you can no longer use tools like Index Server that index the contents of physical files. Instead, you'll need to code the query logic yourself. For each database-driven application, the search facility will be different, because usually your back-end database and the front-end requirements are different. However, part of code can easily be reused in other projects. In this article, I will focus on building a search facility for TheSoccerSite, a database-driven soccer fan site that was created in section 2 of the books Beginning Dreamweaver MX and Beginning Dreamweaver MX 2004. Although the implementation will be specific for the Soccer Site project, you'll get enough background to successfully implement a search facility on your own Web site.

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in shared variables in the Global class and in a database using code in the Global.asax file. The counters in the shared variables are used to display them on a page in your Web site; either as a counter so your visitors can see it as well, or somewhere on a page in your Admin section, so only you have access to them. By writing the counters to a database you can maintain their value even when you restart the Web server, while you still have a fast and scalable solution.

This article extends the ideas from two previous articles where the values of the counters were just stored in static variables in the Global class and in a text file.

There are also Classic ASP and VB.NET versions of this article available.

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in static variables in the Global class and in a text file using code in the Global.asax file. This article extends the ideas from a previous article where the values of the counters were just stored in static variables. By writing the counters to a file you can maintain their values, even when you restart the Web server.

There is also a Classic ASP version of this article available.

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in static variables using code in the Global.asax file. The disadvantage of this method is that this information is lost when you restart the Web server. Two other articles on this site demonstrate how to store this information in a text file and in a database, so the value for the counter will be preserved when you restart your Web server.

There is also a Classic ASP version of this article available

If you have a copy of the book Beginning Dreamweaver MX, I am sure you are familiar with the project TheSoccerSite. For those not familiar with the project, TheSoccerSite is a Web site where soccer fans around the world go for up-to-date information about soccer events. In 7 Chapters, Server- and Client-Side programming, using ASP, HTML, JavaScript and a Microsoft Access database were introduced. One of the features of the site was a login mechanism to protect the admin section from unauthenticated and unauthorized users.

However, with the current implementation of the login mechanism, you would have to add new users to the database directly. To do this, you'd need to download the database, add the user and then upload the database again. Fortunately, Dreamweaver has a few handy Server Behaviors that make adding a new user to the database very easy.

Your Web browser is set up to handle all kinds of documents. For example, when you open an .html page from a Web site, the browser knows it should parse this file, and display its rendered contents onscreen. The same is true for images; when you click on a link that directly links to an image, the image will be displayed in the browser.

This default behavior may not always be what you want. In some scenario's, it's useful to have the user download and save the file, instead of displaying it in the browser. This is a common requirement for files like images, Word documents, spread sheets and so on. This article will demonstrate you how you can force the client browser to present the Save As dialog, so your users can download the file and save it on their local hard disk.

Pocket PC applications, just like ordinary Windows applications, often use images for all kinds of purposes, like Toolbar buttons, backgrounds, or just to spice up the User Interface. If you want to be certain that the images you're going need are always present on the device, you can embed them in the assembly, so they are always available. This article will explore the steps you need to perform to embed the image in the assembly, and how to retrieve the image again at runtime.

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in Application variables and in a database using code in the global.asa file. The counters in the Application variables are used to display them on a page in your Web site; either as a counter so your visitors can see it as well, or somewhere on a page in your Admin section, so only you have access to them. By writing the counter to a database you can maintain its value even when you restart the Web server, while you still have a fast and scalable solution.

This article extends the ideas from two previous articles where the values of the counters were just stored in Application variables and in a text file.

There is also an ASP.NET version of this article available.

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in Application variables and in a text file using code in the global.asa file. This article extends the ideas from a previous article where the values of the counters were just stored in Application variables. By writing the counters to a file you can maintain their values, even when you restart the Web server.

There is also an ASP.NET version of this article available.

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in Application variables using code in the global.asa file. The disadvantage of this method is that this information is lost when you restart the Web server. Two subsequent articles will demonstrate how to store this information in a text file and in a database, so the value for the counter will be preserved when you restart your Web server.

There is also an ASP.NET version of this article available.