How To Dynamically Include Files in Active Server Pages (192144)


The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Active Server Pages
  • Microsoft Visual InterDev 1.0, when used with:
    • the hardware: Intel x86
  • Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0, when used with:
    • the hardware: Intel x86
  • Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0
  • Microsoft Internet Information Server 5.0
This article was previously published under Q192144

SUMMARY

Since Active Server Pages (ASP) pages are compiled and executed before being sent to the client (as static HTML), trying to use a variable in place of a file name in a Server Side Include (<!-- #include PathType = FileName -->) fails. To include a file in your ASP page, you could include code similar to the following that reads in a file and displays it.

MORE INFORMATION

<% ' The name of the file to display was passed by a form using GET method

      infil = Request.QueryString("file")

      If infil <&>"" then

         set fso = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
         set fil = fso.OpenTextFile(infil)

         outstring = fil.ReadAll

         ' PRE tags preserve the format of the file

         Response.write "<PRE>" & outstring & "</PRE><BR>"

      End If
   %>

The dynamically included file may contain any client-side code you wish, including HTML and JavaScript. However, ASP will NOT process server-side script in the file. This is because all the ASP code has already run when it includes the file and the server will not go back to read anything for server-side processing again.

REFERENCES

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

172024 INFO: Server Side Include Directives Not Processed by ASP

Modification Type:MinorLast Reviewed:7/1/2004
Keywords:kbCodeSnippet kbhowto kbScript KB192144
©2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.