Classes In Classic ASP

Last updated: 2008-01-30 00:00:00

One great feature of Classic ASP with VBScript programming is the Class. Here I describe a little about the basics of using classes.

There are a number of benefits to using classes in VBScript

I'll write another article that covers all of the benefits, but for now I'll just list a few.

Benefits of using ASP/VbScript classes

• Classes make it easy to keep things organized and simple
• Classes are the only way to do variable scoping
• You need classes to be able to do Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
• Classes provide another way of thinking about the functionality your code provides

You must declare the class, and code it's members before you can us it. Here is a very basic class:

class Book

  private m_name
  private m_author

  public sub Create(name, author)
    m_name = name
    m_author = author
  end sub

  public function GetName
    GetName = m_name
  end function

  public function GetAuthor
    GetAuthor = m_author
  end function 

  public function GetNameAndAuthor
    GetNameAndAuthor = m_name & " by " & m_author
  end function

end class

And here is how it would be used:

dim someBook
set someBook = new Book
someBook.Create("Two Years Before the
  Mast", "Richard Henry Dana")

response.write someBook.GetNameAndAuthor

This should output the following:

Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana

There is a lot there, and I'll try to clarify everything for you when I expand on this article.