[thelist] To Application or Not ..

[Ashok Hariharan]

Using the Application object is a good idea. Though persisting large
arrays in an application object can have performance implications....
For instance, with vbscript if you have an array of 1000 elements (of
strings),
and if you extract at a particular index, to my knowledge, the way ASP
works
it makes a temporary copy of the entire array before you can extract
the string at the specific element.

In light of that, your method of using the text file holds water.  Most
modern
operating systems and hardware provide pretty good disk caching -- so the
performance hit should be minimal (i guess as long as you access data
sequentially)

However, i can suggest an improvement to the text file method.
Instead of  writing the list of data to the text file from the Admin form,
why
don't you write it as HTML,
i.e. instead of  :

USA
UK
USSR

write it as:

<select name="countries">
<option>USA</option>
<option>UK</option>
<option>USSR</option>
</select>


so that now you can read the text-file using FSO and directly print out the
contents
onto your HTML page.

HTH

--ashok

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Ashok Hariharan
listman(at)hazard0us.org
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