HOWTO: Dynamically Include Files in Active Server Pages

ID: Q192144

The information in this article applies to:

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:

Q172024 INFO: Server Side Include Directives Not Processed by ASP

Additional query words: 


Keywords          : kbASP kbJScript kbScript kbVBScript kbVisID kbGrpASP 
Version           : WINDOWS:1.0,6.0; winnt:
Platform          : WINDOWS winnt 
Issue type        : kbhowto

Last Reviewed: May 27, 1999