13.0.0- Using Recordsets

Using Recordsets

In the previous chapter we spent a lot of time looking at the connection to the data store. While it's fundamental to the process of passing data between our ASP pages and our data stores, it's not really very exciting – what we really want to see is lots of data in your ASP pages. For that, we need to build on what we've learned about ADO so far. So, in this chapter we will:

• Examine what recordsets are, and how we use them
• Explain the notion of a cursor, and meet the different types of cursor
• Understand the concept of 'locking' a data store
• Learn how to move back and forwards through the records of our recordset
• See how we can search the recordset for individual records
• Hide all the items in a recordset that don't meet a specific criterion
• Get more information about the recordset

In this chapter we'll really begin to get to the heart of using ADO for data access within our ASP pages. We'll be looking at how you can run queries and stored procedures, to both return and insert data. We'll also be looking at ways to build HTML tables automatically from a set of data.

Before we start, we should just highlight that data can pass between the data store and the ASP page, in either direction. To keep things fairly simple, the examples in this chapter will all involve reading data from the data store and using it within our ASP pages. In the next chapter , we'll look at how we can write data from the ASP page to the data store, and hence keep a permanent copy of data that is generated by the user, or by the ASP, or by scripting logic as part of the page.