25.1 VBScript Limitations and Solutions

Using ADSI from within WSH is very useful, but it does have certain limitations. For one thing, you cannot display output on screen in anything other than a MsgBox or request information from users without using the InputBox. It is easy to show how these are lacking. Consider that we wish to write a general script that adds a user to a single group selected from a list. If we wrote this under WSH, we would have to list all the groups to the screen in a large MsgBox (or via a file using Notepad) with incremental numbers so that each group could be identified. Then the person running the script would have to remember the number and type it into an InputBox later so that the request could be serviced. If there were more than a few dozen groups in Active Directory, the person running the script would have to go through a number of screens of groups before being able to see them all. It would be much simpler just to display a drop-down list box of all groups and have the user select one. This is not possible under WSH using VBScript, but it is possible under VB and Active Server Pages (ASP).

VB provides a full programming environment for your ADSI applications. ASP provides VBScript with the user-interface facilities that HTML allows, effectively making your scripts more user friendly. ASPs are useful for two important reasons. First, there is a single copy maintained in the organization. Hence, if the single copy is updated, everyone gets the latest copy on the next use. This also saves you from version hell—having multiple versions of a program floating around. Second, no runtime or design-time licenses are required in the development of such pages, as is the case when you develop VB applications.

Also, if we publish the web pages on an Internet server rather than an intranet server, we can make the scripts available to anyone who has the correct privilege to the script whether he is on our local network or not. At present you may find it hard to see a need for being able to manipulate Active Directory from outside the organization. As Active Directory becomes a larger store for complex objects, you may find yourself writing pages to interrogate company databases as well as Active Directory, bringing both sets of information forward to the user. Web pages also allow you to prototype or identify a need for a future application. If you find that your users are making heavy use of the web interface, perhaps it is time to consider rolling out a proper application. It all depends on what sort of mechanism you prefer to develop and maintain to let your users access your Active Directory.

This chapter will describe in detail how to create ASPs using HTML and ADSI and how to migrate VBScript scripts to simple VB applications.

While incorporating ADSI scripts into ASPs via HTML is fairly easy, anyone who is considering using VBScript with HTML pages needs to do some background reading. This chapter alone barely scratches the surface and in no way covers HTML in any real depth.