Have you ever wanted to write an ASP page that did the following: execute an ASP script on another webserver; retrieve that remote ASP script's output; and act on that output? Or perhaps you've always wanted to be able to do remote Server Side Includes, like <!--#include file="http://www.someserver.com/somefile.txt"-->. ASP, alone, can't do that sort of thing. There are, however, third party components that will!

There are two components that I am aware of. The first, AspHttp, costs $49.95 for a single CPU liscense. Being a cheap skate, I am not going to discuss this component, since I can't test it out without paying $50 bucks. Fortunately there is a free component, AspTear, from Softwing. :)

This component is easy to install, and even easier to use. Let's say that you want to execute an ASP script on another server that returns the current stock price for Microsoft. We could write our own ASP script on our own server that would show this value, by simply doing:

'AspTear constants Const Request_POST = 1 Const Request_GET = 2 Set objTear = CreateObject("SOFTWING.ASPtear") Response.ContentType = "text/html" On Error Resume Next Dim strRetval ' URL, action, payload, username, password strRetval = objTear.Retrieve("http://www.stockquotes.com/msft.asp", Request_GET, "", "", "") If Err.Number <> 0 Then      Response.Write "<b>"      If Err.Number >= 400 Then          Response.Write "Server returned error: " & Err.Number      Else          Response.Write "Component/WinInet error: " & Err.Description      End If      Response.Write "</b>" Response.End End If Response.Write "Microsoft currently selling at " & FormatCurrency(strRetval, 2)

Please note that I have no idea if there even exists an http://stockquotes.com, I just made up an example site/ASP script that might return Microsoft's current stock price.

It's pretty easy, eh? You can even send information in the QueryString or POST (to do so, you choose Request_GET or Request_POST, respectively). So, let's say that there was an ASP page that would return any stock quote. All you needed to do was specify the stock symbol in the QueryString. Let's look at how the code for that might look:

'AspTear constants Const Request_POST = 1 Const Request_GET = 2 Set objTear = CreateObject("SOFTWING.ASPtear") Response.ContentType = "text/html" On Error Resume Next Dim strRetval ' URL, action, payload, username, password strRetval = objTear.Retrieve("http://www.stockquotes.com/getquote.asp", Request_GET, "symbol=MSFT", "", "") ' ... Error checking code omitted ... Response.Write "Microsoft currently selling at " & FormatCurrency(strRetval, 2)

And you're not limited to executing just ASP scripts. You can grab raw HTML, or execute Perl or CGI scripts. Pretty neat, eh?

Happy Programming!