Inside Technique : Adding Discussion Forums : Download and Installation

These scripts require a Window's NT machine with IIS 4.0 and SQL Server. To install this discussion forum, you need to download discussion.zip and decompress all the files and directories into your web-sites root directory. Once the files are in your root directory, you need to create your SQL Server database.

We built this demonstration using SQL Server 6.5 but there is no reason it should not run with SQL Server 7.0. To make it easy to create the database, you will find a file called discussion.sql that contains all the SQL commands necessary to create the tables and stored procedures. You just need to execute this SQL file against a new SQL Server database. (In SQL Server 6.5, after creating the database, open the SQL Enterprise Manager, select the database, choose SQL Query Tool from the Tools menu and open and run the discussion.sql file).

After creating your database you need to create an ODBC DSN (from the ODBC control panel) so the ASP scripts can connect to the database. After creating the DSN, you need to update the GetConnection function inside of utility.asp (in the inc directory) with the correct DSN name, user, and password:

function GetConnection()
  const DSN = "membershipdb"
  const UID = "webuser"
  const PASSWORD = "password"

  Dim p_oConn, sDSN
  Set p_oConn = server.createObject("ADODB.Connection")
  sDSN = "DSN=" & DSN & ";uid=" & UID & ";password=" & PASSWORD
  p_oConn.open sDSN
  Set GetConnection = p_oConn
end function

Included in this download are all the files for creating the membership table from the article Adding Site Membership. If you have already set up the user member table, be sure to delete the SQL statements that generate the t_user table or you will lose your data.

As with all articles in this series we are merely providing the core pieces for adding membership and community features. Before introducing this into a production system you need to evaluate the performance, security and error handling of the scripts. We permit you to reuse these scripts as a learning device. To reuse this work in a production system, we ask that you make available to us for possible publishing any updates or changes you make to the database or interactions with the database. This includes any extensions that are built over this code.

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