21.2 ASP Tags

Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side product offered by most ISPs using Microsoft IIS web servers. ISPs using Unix- or Solaris-based servers typically offer an ASP knock-off such as Chili!Soft's ASP. ASP processes server-side scripts and delivers HTML pages to the user's browser dynamically. For an overview of ASP, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/server/asp/ASPover.asp.

For more information on ASP, see A. Keyton Weissinger's ASP in a Nutshell (O'Reilly).

ASP files have an .asp extension. Blocks of ASP code start with <% and end with %>. Therefore, the following excerpt from the ASP.xml file identifies ASP code as string-delimited:

<tagspec tag_name="asp" detect_in_attribute="true"
  start_string="<%" end_string="%>"
  icon="ASP.gif" icon_width="17" icon_height="15">
</tagspec>

The ASPScripts.xml file identifies additional ASP scripts tags. For example, it identifies the MM_CMD tag as being an HTML-style tag that is empty, not rendered, and that can appear anywhere in the document:

<tagspec tag_name="MM_CMD" tag_type="empty"
  render_contents="false" content_model="marker_model"
  icon="ASP.gif" icon_width="17" icon_height="15">
</tagspec>

The ASP-related tags recognized by Dreamweaver are listed in Table 21-1.

Table 21-1. Recognized ASP tags

Opening delimiter or tag	Closing delimiter or tag	Description
<%	%>	Delimits all ASP code
<MM_CMD>	N/A	Inserts a server command
<MM_CMDRECSET>	N/A	Performs a command on a record set
<MM_RECORDSET>	</MM_RECORDSET>	Manipulates the contents of a record set
<MM_ASPSCRIPT>	N/A	Inserts ASP Script into the document
<MM_VARIABLES>	</MM_VARIABLES>	Identifies variables