dictionary object in asp

benf posted this at 02:22 — 8th January 2007.

Joined: Feb 2005

Im trying to use the dictionary object in asp and it is working fine however i want to add a new object (key and item) to the dictionary dynamically....ie when a user clicks on a link it carries a value in the url that i want to add to the dictionary which will them used to search the database to display results in a table...it is going to be a shopping cart!

help appreciated. Below is what i have so far.

<html>
<body>
<%
Dim cart
Dim objDict
Dim PID
Dim x, y
PID = request.querystring("product_ID")

Set ORSp=server.createobject("ADODB.Connection")
ORSp.Open "DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)}; DBQ=" & Server.MapPath("20509703.mdb") 
Set cart = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")
<strong>Set objDict = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary")</strong>

If PID <> "" Then
	
<strong>	objDict.Add PID,1 </strong>

	'looping through all the keys to retrieve their values for query

	allKeys = objDict.Keys 'Get all the items into an array 

	For i = 0 To objDict.Count - 1

<strong>		myKey = allkeys(i) </strong>
	
		sqltext="Select * from products where product_ID ="&myKey
		cart.Open sqltext, ORSp	
	
		while Not cart.EOF
			
		  response.write(cart("PName")&"</br>")

		cart.movenext
		wend

		cart.close

	Next



'free up resources
set objDict=nothing

end If


%>
</body>
</html

Parts in bold are those that involve the dictionary. At the top you can see where i have just added one entry statically.

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JeevesBond posted this at 02:59 — 19th January 2007.

He has: 3,956 posts

Joined: Jun 2002

Hi ben, sorry this wasn't answered earlier. Is there a specific problem you're having with this?

The code above seems like it will work. It's not very efficient to do a SQL query for every iteration of that loop though, what would be better is to iterate through the dictionary building a string which will be the WHERE clause in your SQL statement.

Dictionaries are very optimised in ASP (and VB6 too) so are a good choice in this case. You might want to make your loop look a little more like:

For i = 0 To objDict.Count - 1
  myKey = allkeys(i) 

  If i = 0 Then
    sqltext = "Select * from products where product_ID =" & myKey
  Else
    sqltext = sqltext & " or product_ID = " & myKey
  End If 
Next

sqltext = sqltext & ";"

cart.Open sqltext, ORSp
cart.MoveFirst
	
while Not cart.EOF
  response.write(cart("PName")&"<br />")
  cart.movenext
wend

cart.close

Hope this makes sense! It's been a while since I did any ASP programming so please forgive any errors in that code.

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