Peter Johnson's Blog

Some time ago I was doing maintenance work on some classic ASP pages and couldn’t get detailed error reports sent back to the browser. Using Internet Explorer I disabled “Show friendly HTTP error messages” but still received the generic HTTP 500 type error messages from IIS 7.0 running under Windows Server 2008. The same also occurred under FireFox. The modifications I was making to the ASP pages were fairly limited so I gave up on trying to get it to work and ending up sticking with examining the IIS logs on the server for debugging information.

Today I started work on maintaining some more complex ASP pages developed by someone else under Vista x64 and IIS 7 and encountered the same problem. I also noticed Vista locks the IIS log files while the web server is running which further added to my determination to get ASP errors including line numbers back to the browser. It appears setting “Send Errors To Browser” in “Debugging Properties” for the ASP properties doesn’t work at a virtual directory level, it only works when enabled at the root level for the entire site. Enabling it at the higher level got back the detailed error reports as per the default bahaviour of IIS 6.

This is a simple ASP site map generator that I wrote some time ago using VBScript, it’s for a human-readable sitemap not the XML sitemaps used by Google and other search engines. It uses the Scripting.FileSystemObject to scan the same directory level that the ASP is placed at and returns a link to any htm or html pages found along with the last modification time and the title of the page. It was fairly quickly written so the parsing used for the title tag is just to suit the format I was using and it might need some other tweaking to suit your own site.

Because I don’t actively use the script anymore I haven’t updated to XHTML 1.0 Strict so on the W3C Markup Validation Service it will only pass as HTML 4.01 Transitional. Currently presentation elements are embedded in the HTML rather than a CSS style sheet. Here is the main logic for the page:

<table border="1">
<tr><td><b>Page name</b></td><td ALIGN="RIGHT"><b>Modified</b></td><td><b>Title</b></td></tr>
<%
	Dim objFSO, objFolder, objFiles, objFile, strFile, Title, CurLine, LCaseLine, TitlePos, PageCount, FontColour

	Private Sub GetTitle(FileName)
		Dim fso, file, strPhysicalPath

		Title = ""
		set fso = Server.Createobject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
		strPhysicalPath = Server.MapPath(FileName)
		set file = fso.opentextfile(strPhysicalPath, 1)
		do until file.AtEndOfStream or Len(Title) > 0
			CurLine = file.ReadLine
			LCaseLine = LCase(CurLine)
			TitlePos = InStr(LCaseLine, "<title>")
			if TitlePos then
				Title = Right(CurLine, Len(CurLine) - TitlePos - 6)
				Title = Left(Title, InStr(LCaseLine, "</title>") - 8 )
			end if
		loop
		file.close
	End Sub

	Set objFSO = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
	Set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(Server.MapPath("."))
	Set objFiles = objFolder.Files
	PageCount = 0
	For Each objFile in objFiles
		strFile = LCase(objFile.Name)
		If Right(strFile, 4) = ".htm" or Right(strFile, 5) = ".html"  then
			GetTitle(objFile.Name)
			if Len(Title) > 0 then
				PageCount = PageCount + 1
				if objFile.DateLastModified >= Date - 7 then
					FontColour = "<font color=""#FF0000"">"
				else
					FontColour = "<font color=""#000000"">"
				end if
				Response.Write("<tr><td><a href=""" & strFile & """>" & _
					strFile & "</a></td><td align=""RIGHT"">" & _
					FontColour & DateValue(objFile.DateLastModified) & "</font>" & _
					"</td><td>" & Title & "</td></tr>")
			end if
		end if
	next
	Response.Write("<tr><td> </td><td> </td><td><b>Total pages: " & PageCount & "</b></td></tr>")
%>
</table>


		

I’m a member of a web site where we run various games in the forums and for several that can be tedious to keep track of manually I’ve written some code in Borland Delphi to automate the task. The forum itself is phpBB and I use the web browser component included with Delphi to edit posts directly in the forum. Being able to post to a website as though a user submitted a form is handy for these sorts to tasks where you don’t have access to the underlying forum database. I’ve posted the more interesting parts of the code that format the request and setup the correct headers:

var
  strData: String;
  PostData, Headers: OleVariant;
...................
strData := 'message=' + HTTPEncode(MessageData) + '&notify=on&mode=editpost&p=' + IntToStr(PostID) + '&post=+Post+';

PostData := VarArrayCreate([0, Length(strData) - 1], varByte);

for i := 1 to Length(strData) do
  PostData[i-1] := Ord(strData[i]);

Headers := 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' + #10#13;

WebBrowser.Navigate('http://example.com/posting.php?mode=reply&t=' + MainTopicID.Text, EmptyParam, EmptyParam, PostData, Headers);