Part VII: Tip of the Day

In this part, you will add a "tip of the day" feature to SEARCH.ASP, which will show a new Visual Basic tip each time a query is run. This feature uses the TextStream object of the File Access component to access a text file of tips and display one at random.

Step 1

If you don't already have the Magazine project open, open it now. Add the text file TIPS.TXT to your project from the CD-ROM that accompanies this book.

Step 2

Open TIPS.TXT, and examine the contents. Notice that the file structure has each tip on a separate line. You select a tip at random by reading a random line from the file. In SEARCH.ASP, add the following code below the </TABLE> tag to present the tips:

<H1>Tip of the Day...</H1> <%  ` Tip of the day ` Variables Dim objFile Dim objStream Dim TextNumber Dim i Set objFile = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set objStream = objFile.OpenTextFile(Server.MapPath ("/Magazine") _     + "\tips.txt") Randomize Timer TextNumber = Int(Rnd*30)  For i = 0 to TextNumber     objStream.SkipLine  Next strText = objStream.ReadLine  objStream.Close  %> <H4><%=strText%></H4> 

Your result should look like Figure 8-9 on the following page.

Figure 8-9. Tip of the day.