Concept


Clarity of code

Converter attempts to produce the code which can be 
well written, easy to understand, and easy to develop. 

Thus, the main goal of vb2asp 

  - is not the full and automated conversion, but
  - reliable partial conversion,
  - making clear what is converted, 
  - what is not converted, and 
  - what has to be done to complete the task.

The secondary goal is to make possible few-clicks-conversion
    for simple projects when no programmer intervention needed at all, and
    when programmer has no deep knowledge of ASP, VB, HTML, and JS.



Given VB Application functionality is split between Dll and ASP code.


  Converter creates three projects
     asp project
     dll project 
     dll-caller desktop project

  Most of the functionality is moved into dll.

  After conversion, there are two levels of 
  modifications possible:
  
      - editing dll code in VB environment,
      - editing/converting asp-code. 


What is Converter
  
  Physically, Converter is a folder ...\vb2asp which contains text files.
  This files are schemas or auxilairy templates.
  To run this files, programmer needs two programs:
     an engine, Script2Script.dll, and
     GUI,       s2s.exe,           which calls this engine.

  No other files outside of folder vb2asp are needed for Converter.
  To run vb2asp, this folder can be located anywere, but for readme and
  help it should be under the folder Examples like for this link:

  More about Engine and Converter relation.

How converted application runs

  First call from web browser to converted application
  can be optionally done in two startup scenarios:
  Preparsed and Dynamic.

  
  Preparsed scenario is designed only
 
     - for debug, or
     - to obtain HTML-templates of design-time Forms without having VB IDE;
       (f.e. to convert ASP script to PHP)

    This is a preliminary test before launch in Dynamic mode. 
    Controls invoked to Browser as they were built at VB-design-time; no dll-invoked.

    Attempt to click to controls does not guarante correct dll run although it may.
    (This attempt always use the dll, which exist as global session's object 
    and processes application's internal tasks between web calls using timers if any.)

    If user clicked controls, then to be sure that following execution will be correct,
    terminate the Session, and rerun it in Dynamic mode from the beginning.

  Dynamic: invokes dll which generates web-page.

    'Dynamic' scenario does not need startup data. 
    This eliminates this converter's lack of resource
    files *.frx parser, because dll will supply all internal 
    data dynamically.
  
  Session Visit Number is maintained to protect application
  from incorrect call from cashed web page.

 
 
 vb2asp reliability
 
Converter Safety Except of vb2asp 'Out_of_disk' bug Converter acts as follows: Converter does not change a bit in source project folder and source project files. All converter's output is inside of RESULT_FILES folder.