[thelist] UltraDev

Norman Beresford n.beresford at anansi.co.uk
Tue May 22 05:48:40 CDT 2001


Hi Jill

I haven't used UltraDev, and I'm tempted to have a look at it, but having
seen some of the code it generates I don't think it's going to feature
heavily in my tool bag.  So I can't help you with the books, but I can help
you with the second question (assuming you're using ASP).

There are a number of methods for storing information between pages which
don't rely on session variables.  As you pointed out Cookies are one of
them.  Session variables and cookies are very close in nature.  In order to
use session variables the server writes a cookie to the browser with their
session identifier in it.  This has some overheads - the variables are kept
in memory on the server, and they aren't destroyed as soon as the browser
leaves the site.  They could hang around for, typically, 20mins.  So cookies
are superiour from that point of view, however there are security
implications.

The other method of passing information from page to page is via the
querystring.  So you've got a client logged into your site, and you want to
store their name details.  What you'd do is dynamically build all the links
to include this information in the querystring, then on each page you'd
access the querystring.  For example say you had a link like so

<a href="login_page.asp">

You'd change it to this

<a href="login_page.asp?firstname=Jill&surname=Shaw">

Then to get those values you'd use

firstName = request.querystring("firstname")
surname = request.querystring("surname")

And you'd dynamically produce each link on the site like so:

response.write "<a href=""another_page.asp?firstname=" & firstName &
"&surname=" & surname & """>"

There are pros and cons to each method, I prefer to use cookies to transfer
information on the grounds that there's less server overhead, so pages get
served faster.

Norman






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