Dumped in my lap

[Paul Clemmons]

Hopefully someone can help me, or at least direct me to the correct
newsgroup. I just inherited a project where a company created a fairly
complicated interactive website in ASP, provided it to a customer and didn't
give them the database to make it all work. The company went out of
business and I have a customer with everything to do the site but the
database. Is there any way to rebuild the database using the existing
pages? I am fairly proficient at databasing SQL and Access and good at
HTML, but can someone give me a good place to start in building up the
tables for this thing?

Paul Clemmons
PC Networks

 

[Ray at]

The pages would have no way of knowning anything about the database. You'll
have to go through to the code in the pages and see what comments are in
there and if the creator used dynamic SQL that will let you get the names
and relationships of DB objects and try to piece it together manually.

Ray at work

 

[Richard K Bethell]

Hopefully someone can help me, or at least direct me to the correct
newsgroup. I just inherited a project where a company created a fairly
complicated interactive website in ASP, provided it to a customer and didn't
give them the database to make it all work. The company went out of
business and I have a customer with everything to do the site but the
database. Is there any way to rebuild the database using the existing
pages? I am fairly proficient at databasing SQL and Access and good at
HTML, but can someone give me a good place to start in building up the
tables for this thing?

You'll probably have to infer the database from the code. Look in code for
any object that is either assigned by .Execute([sql statement]) or by
Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset"). In either the SQL statement that
creates the object, or the ("ColumnName") properties of the object, you
should see the column names that have to exist, and may get a sense even of
the datatype of the column from how it is used, or what it is named.

Good luck!

 

[Bob Barrows]

Hopefully someone can help me, or at least direct me to the correct
newsgroup. I just inherited a project where a company created a
fairly complicated interactive website in ASP, provided it to a
customer and didn't give them the database to make it all work. The
company went out of business and I have a customer with everything to
do the site but the database. Is there any way to rebuild the
database using the existing pages? I am fairly proficient at
databasing SQL and Access and good at HTML, but can someone give me a
good place to start in building up the tables for this thing?

Paul Clemmons
PC Networks

Did the customer provide specs for the application?

Bob Barrows

 

[Paul Clemmons]

Wow, thanks guys. I have been posting to groups here for years and this has
to be the fastest I have seen responses. I will let you know how it goes.
Paul

 

[Jeff Cochran]

Hopefully someone can help me, or at least direct me to the correct
newsgroup. I just inherited a project where a company created a fairly
complicated interactive website in ASP, provided it to a customer and didn't
give them the database to make it all work. The company went out of
business and I have a customer with everything to do the site but the
database. Is there any way to rebuild the database using the existing
pages? I am fairly proficient at databasing SQL and Access and good at
HTML, but can someone give me a good place to start in building up the
tables for this thing?

Without documentation on the database structure, the best you can do
is start working through the coe, noting database, table and field
references. Hopefully the other company used field names like
FirstName or FName and not Field1. You may have to do a lot of work
with relationships, depending on how sophisticated the original
database was.

Jeff

 

[Chris Barber]

If at all possible get hold of someone (anyone at all) from the other
'Company' and try to get hold of a sample / production database. Investigate
where the website was hosted and see if the host has the database. See if
the customer has any mobile numbers for contacts with the company - perhaps
they used contract developers?
If all this fails (and I'm pretty sure you will have tried all that) then
it's going to be a long, horrible, painful job to recreate the DB.
My suggestion is to get the customer spec on the site and create a new DB
(your own design), write and implement a DB access layer in your preferred
language of choice (script, VB, etc.) and then go through and re-connect the
pages to the new DB access layer.
Trying to re-create the original will be nigh on impossible unless its a
simple one or two table database.

Chris.

Hopefully someone can help me, or at least direct me to the correct
newsgroup. I just inherited a project where a company created a fairly
complicated interactive website in ASP, provided it to a customer and didn't
give them the database to make it all work. The company went out of
business and I have a customer with everything to do the site but the
database. Is there any way to rebuild the database using the existing
pages? I am fairly proficient at databasing SQL and Access and good at
HTML, but can someone give me a good place to start in building up the
tables for this thing?

Paul Clemmons
PC Networks

 

[Paul Clemmons]

He provided me all the asp pages and images. It is like both ends of a
puzzle, with the middle ripped out. The company that created it for my
customer went out of business last year and the database went with it. My
customer has been trying to contact the owner, but 1) he is up in Canada and
sort of gone dark and 2) when he did contact him about two months ago, he
said that he could do it for another $5k (customer already paid $4600 for
what he has now) and it will be another month or so to do it. I am figuring
it will take me about two weeks to get the db back in place and put it on my
development server locally to test and find all the bugs in it.
Fortunately, the main thing the customer needs up is a news database and a
membership database up and running in short order, the rest is a bit later.
Phases.

 

[Mepadre]

Did the design firm also host the site. If not, the DB
may be available from their webhost or possibly on a
backup tape somewhere at the webhost.

Worth a try.

 

[Jon]

In the ASP pages look for the part where it connects to the database (eg
strMDBpath = "e:\.........") this will tell you it's name and expected
location.

Next the fields and table name (strsql = "SELECT COLUMN_NAMES FROM tblNAME
WHERE .......)

The "COLUMN_NAMES" will be the fields, separated by commas.
The "tblNAME" will be the table name.

Look at the ASP page in Dreamweaver or whatever and see what sort of data
will go in the boxes etc, so if it expecting a data, set the field type to
date/time

And so on....

Certainly not worth $5k

Good luck

Jon



Hopefully someone can help me, or at least direct me to the correct
newsgroup. I just inherited a project where a company created a fairly
complicated interactive website in ASP, provided it to a customer and didn't
give them the database to make it all work. The company went out of
business and I have a customer with everything to do the site but the
database. Is there any way to rebuild the database using the existing
pages? I am fairly proficient at databasing SQL and Access and good at
HTML, but can someone give me a good place to start in building up the
tables for this thing?

Paul Clemmons
PC Networks