An ASP Classic Forms Project Enhanced with React

Challenges

• Much of the interface had been written more than 15 years ago using ASP Classic.
• The project owner decided to do things piecemeal.
• In ASP, like PHP, there may be several pages involved in a process; one page may display a form, possibly submitted to a different page, and then possibly also redirected to yet another to display results.
• There is no "API" available.
• While engineering this solution, I was told the original ASP developer would be available to implement the ASP portions of the project. From the start of the project, there was no ASP developer available, so I assumed the role. Being that I was unfamiliar with both ASP and VBScript, the project took longer than anticipated and is still ongoing in piecemeal stages.

Solution

• Learned ASP Classic and created a local test environment.
• Learned VBScript to modify the ASP pages where necessary on render.
• Created interactive components in React.
• Created finite-state machines to prevent invalid form data submissions.
• Tested views in browser and using XCode for mobile and tablet views.
• Modify/constructed SQL queries to pull relevant data.
• Created a live staging environment for project members to approve changes.
• I redesigned a couple of views by cleaning them of archaic code and inline CSS, and added Tailwind CSS to style them.
• To avoid, as much as possible, re-engineering the ASP application's business logic, to save the client money, and avoid having to create an API, I used the same page names to conduct the same abstract functionality.
• To avoid the inherent copying and pasting which comes along with old-style web development, most views were recreated in React.
• Utilized Vite as a development environment and to build the page assets.
• Wrote a script to replace the asset requirements in all affected ASP pages, thus resolving caching issues with shared assets.
• Copied the ASP page from the original server, stripped them of everything but skeleton HTML, reused/wrote SQL queries and pulled data, then created a React application to cover that portion of the web application.
• Rendered ASP pages with JavaScript variables containing data necessary to build the React views.