After much waiting (and little patience on my part), my day has finally arrived. While I'm on my trip to Valley City tomorrow, I'll be able to pick up my copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004 with Flash Professional, which has possibly the longest software title ever. The timing couldn't be more perfect - my evaluation copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004 has one more day left in its 30-day trial period. I will also be able to make good use of Flash MX 2004 Professional, as I was just commissioned to do a 50-minute intro to Flash session at the fall NDATL face-2-face meeting in Minot next month. Now I just need a few extra hours in the day to prepare...

I wasn't looking for more reasons to despise FrontPage, but well, here we are. I'm currently working with some HTML surveys created in FrontPage that take all of the responses and dump them into an access database. Here are some problems I've run into while trying to get the database interaction working:

• The production server where the surveys were housed is now permanently offline due to repeated hacking
• After retrieving all of the web pages off that server with the help of a knowledgeable co-worker, I had to install IIS 5.0 on my Windows XP laptop
• FrontPage 2002 was on my system, but due to an issue related to a security patch applied in early September the software wanted to activate itself every time I launched FP2002. I wasn't even able to uninstall and reinstall Office XP without manually going into the Windows registry and deleting several registry keys
• I had to find, download, and install the new version of the FrontPage Server Extensions (which I believe are now called SharePoint)
• I got permission error after permission error when trying to view the pages in a web browser

Admittedly, not all of these problems are directly related to FrontPage, but the hoops you need to jump through in order to get this working are just crazy. I am now able to run the survey file (an asp document) off my laptop. Here's my current problem: I quickly run through the survey, hit submit the submit button, which redirects me to a thank you page telling me that my answers have been recorded, but when I go into the actual access database to view the raw data, nothing is there. For some reason, the responses are not being dumped into the database. I created a quick "view" page to display all records in the database, which do show up when I manually put them in access.

This is driving me crazy. For as simple as FrontPage is supposed to be, getting this to work shouldn't be a problem. Sifting through the source reveals the extraordinary amount of crap that FP creates in the pursuit of "simplicity". All database interaction seems to be made through webbot tags that the FrontPage extensions use to do its magic. These tags call server-side include files like fpdbform.inc, which I'm trying to decipher right now. Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way, but there doesn't seem to be a way to modify an existing database input page in FrontPage - I just see the option to create a new one from scratch, which won't save me much time.

Update @ 3:18 PM: Well, I finally got it working! After a lot of troubleshooting and google searching, I ended up on a FrontPage discussion forum called FrontPageTalk. I found a discussion thread started by a guy who seemed to be having the same problem as myself. A knowledgeable user named TexasWebDevelopers posted an asp script that makes a database connection and attempts to add some data to the database. I copy and pasted the script into a new web page, made a few modifications, saved it as debug.asp, and ran it from my browser. I can't remember the exact error message it gave me, but I knew exactly what it meant - the directory where the database was located didn't give write permissions to IUSR, the Internet Guest Account created automatically by IIS that is used whenever someone requests a web page from my laptop. I went into the Security section of that folders properties and gave IUSR read and write access to everything in that folder (which is just that database right now). I reran the survey, hit submit, and then looked at the database in Access - it finally saved the data for me.

Between IIS on Windows and Apache on Mac OS X, I'm certainly running into a lot of permissions issues. I may need to find a good reference site or book on the subject so I can prevent these things to begin with...