Creating dynamic web pages from a database

Factual Questions
1

Is it possible with basic html (meaning, without making users install a plug in) to have a web site that creates pages on demand as the users ask for them…
I want to make a web site with a huge list of CDs, but I don’t really want to have several hundred individual html files… I’d like to have one master database file and have a pop up display the tracklisting on demand as requested… is this possible?

If it matters, I have the CDs in a third party database program right now, but exporting it to delimited text is easy as pie.

Thanks…

2

Take a look at ASP(active server pages), PHP or JSP.

They are all serverside componenents made for problems exactly like yours. If you are working on a windows machine i recommed ASP as its easy to use and documentation is out there in abundance.

For the database, MS Access is probably sufficient.

<A href=http://www.w3schools.com/asp/asp_intro.asp>ASP Tutorial</A>

Good luck

3

You can’t do it in HTML. You need a server that has one of the many dynamic page technologies out there.

4

Hmm, how come i can’t edit my post ? Tells me i don’t have permission to access the page :frowning: .

5

That’s cause you don’t have permission to access the page. Use preview to catch errors.

6

Does your web server give you CGI ability? That means that you have a file called for example dynamicpage.cgi, and when a user requests that page (http://www.mydomain.com/dynamicpage.cgi ), and instead of returning the contents of that file, the server runs the file as a program. This program can be a compiled program or a Perl script, or some of the others that people before have mentioned but I know nothing about.

But the fundamental thing you would need is CGI capability on your web server.

7

Another (and rather more crude) way to do it would be to create static pages, but do it using some sort of automated process from your database; I’ve done this before in MS Access (only because I was in too much of a hurry to learn what I needed to do it dynamically.

Each of the pages was an advance information document about a book; there was a consistent style for all of the pages and really it was just the contents of a few text fields and a few image links that were different on each page, so I created a template page, then cut the HTML into blocks (the bits between the variable fields) then iterated through the table, concatenating them back together with the values in between and saved the result in a separate HTML (text)file ; you can easily create an index page this way too.

Dirty and unprofessional, but quick and it worked.