BlueZone and Active Server Page Technology

If you are not familiar with Microsoft Active Server Page (ASP) technology, here is a brief synopsis as to how it can be used in conjunction with BlueZone Scripting.

What is Active Server Page Technology?

Active Server Page (ASP) Technology is a very powerful “server side” scripting environment which can be used by a developer to create interactive scripts that can be included inside HTML web pages to capture data and dynamically create web pages that are user specific.

For example, ASP can be used to create HTML forms which can be used to capture End User information like Username and Password. The form then passes the End User’s Username and Password to a corresponding variable in the ASP script which can then dynamically create a web page with the Username and Password as part of the page.

How Can ASP Be Used in Conjunction With BlueZone?

BlueZone Web-to-Host is launched and controlled by an ActiveX Control that we call the SEAGULL Web-to-Host Control Module. This control is launched via an HTML tag called the Object Tag.

Inside this Object Tag, are Param Name/Value Pairs that control the characteristics of your BlueZone Sessions. When an Object Tag is part of a standard HTML web page. The Param Name/Value Pairs have to be “fixed” or hard coded.

However, when the Object Tag is included as part of an ASP script, you can assign variables to some or all of the the Param Name/Value Pairs. So the values in the Object Tag are no longer “fixed” or hard coded, but can vary based on who the user is for example.

For example, a way that ASP can be used with BlueZone is to create an HTML form, that captures the End User’s Username and Password. Then the values of Username and Password can be passed as variables to the Object Tag using an ASP script.

The end result is that when the BlueZone Display session launches, the End User’s Username and Password are passed from the form to a BlueZone script which will automatically log the User into the host.

How Can I “Tie-in” An ASP Script with BlueZone?

Here is a sample “screen shot” of an HTML Form that is presented to the End User:

The End User enters his Username and Password into the form. These values are stored for use by the ASP script.

This is what the HTML Object Tag looks like when it is part of an ASP script on the web server. Note that there are two variables for the Param Name Var1 and for Var2 shown in red.

%>
<OBJECT ID="Seagull Web-to-Host Control Module v3"
CLASSID="clsid:037790A6-1576-11D6-903D-00105AABADD3"
CODEBASE="../sglw2hcm.ocx#Version=3,2,1,296" HEIGHT=0 WIDTH=0>
<PARAM NAME="IniFile" VALUE="default.ini">
<PARAM NAME="Sessions" VALUE="MD_S1">
<PARAM NAME="MD_DistFile" VALUE="display.e3d">
<PARAM NAME="MD_S1" VALUE="mfdisp1.zmd">
<PARAM NAME="MD_S1_Save" VALUE="Yes">
<PARAM NAME="MD_S1_Var1" VALUE="<%= Username%>">
<PARAM NAME="MD_S1_Var2" VALUE="<%= Password%>
%>

The ASP script then substitutes the values for Username and Password from the form for the variable values <%= Username%> and <%= Password%> in the Object Tag.

This is what the HTML Object Tag looks like after the ASP script has finished substituting the Username and Password variables from the HTML form. This resultant page is what gets sent to the End User’s browser:

<OBJECT ID="Seagull Web-to-Host Control Module v3"
CLASSID="clsid:037790A6-1576-11D6-903D-00105AABADD3"
CODEBASE="../sglw2hcm.ocx#Version=3,2,1,296" HEIGHT=0 WIDTH=0>
<PARAM NAME="IniFile" VALUE="default.ini">
<PARAM NAME="Sessions" VALUE="MD_S1">
<PARAM NAME="MD_DistFile" VALUE="display.e3d">
<PARAM NAME="MD_S1" VALUE="mfdisp1.zmd">
<PARAM NAME="MD_S1_Save" VALUE="Yes">
<PARAM NAME="MD_S1_Var1" VALUE="JDoe">
<PARAM NAME="MD_S1_Var2" VALUE="MyPassword”>

When the BlueZone script reads in the Param Name / Value Pair for Var1 and Var2, it will substitute JDoe and MyPassword for the values of Var1 and Var2 in the script.