Believe it or not, there was a time when no online calendars existed. So I wrote one. People liked it so I sold it as a $65 widget for a number of years.
- Created: 1997
- Platform: Active Server Pages on Internet Information Server
A number of organizations hired me to customize and extend the calendar, among them a fire department, college, county and church.
- Elegant day, week and month views supported across version 3 and 4 browsers (painful) with clever
<table>usage. - Themeable from a set of coordinated palettes with instructions on how to create your own.
- Data model allowing various kinds of event repetition and events that span days.
webCal 3.55 is an ASP based calendaring program distributed in a ZIP file that should include the following files:
webCal3_month.asp Month view
webCal3_week.asp Week view
webCal3_detail.asp Detail on a single event
webCal3_edit.asp Edit an event
webCal3_updated.asp Updates database after event edit
webCal3_deleted.asp Deletes event from database
webCal3_find.asp Search form
webCal3_found.asp Processes and displays query results
webCal3_print-month.asp Generates month view for printing
webCal3_print-week.asp Generates week view for printing
webCal3_mini.asp Miniature calendar used for popup
webCal3_popup.js JavaScript for popup calendar
webCal3_themes.inc Included color themes for all pages
webCal3_showrecur.inc Special formatting for different recurrence
webCal3_verify.inc Checks to see if user has logged in
webCal3_login.asp Login screen
webCal3_user-admin.asp User administration form
webCal3_user-edit.asp Edit user details
webCal3_user-updated.asp Updates database after user edit
webCal3_user-deleted.asp Deletes user from database
show_status.inc Generates JavaScript to update status bar
data/webCal.mdb Access 2000 database for storing events
data/webCal3_data.inc Connects to database
images/*.gif Calendar toolbar images
Each file contains individual documentation.
Copy the files to a directory beneath the WWW root of your ASP compatible web server. The name of the main webCal directory is unimportant but the names of the subdirectories /data and /images cannot be changed without also modifying the calendar scripts. Also, the file names cannot be changed without modifying the scripts.
Once the files are copied you may create a link to either webCal3_month.asp or webCal3_week.asp, or both. The other files are invoked internally or linked to from the main calendar pages. Click on the "week" icon at the end of each week in the month view to switch to the week view. To switch to the month view from the week view, click on the month name at the top.
Before you begin adding events you will need to add one or more user accounts. To do so, click on the key icon at the top of the calendar and login as the administrator. As shipped, the administrator's user name is "admin" with a password of "user". It is strongly recommended that you change these values (see next section).
Once you have logged in as the administrator, a user management icon should replace the key icon in the main calendar view. Click on this icon to enter the user management form. To add a user, select "Add" and enter user details.
Once you have added a user account you can select "Logout" from the main calendar view to logout of the administrator account and then select the key icon to log in as the new user. Once you have logged in, click on any date to add an event to that date. Alternatively, you can click on a date before logging in as the new user, and you will be prompted to login at that time.
webCal allows you to easily change the date format and colors used throughout the entire calendar by editing one file, webCal3_themes.inc. This file includes instructions and examples on how to adjust the date format and color themes.
All the accounts except for the administrator's can be edited online. To make changes to the administrator's account, you must edit the table "cal_users" in the webCal database. This is meant as a security measure.
Other accounts can be edited by any user given "Administrator" (as opposed to "User") level access. When deleting an account you have the option of erasing all events scheduled by that user or moving those events to another user.
If you will be using webCal on a public server then some steps should be taken to secure the webCal database. There are two ways to restrict access to your database: change permissions on the database so that unauthorized users cannot download it or move the database to a directory outside of your web root.
If you want to leave the database in the default location, the /data folder under the main webCal files, then you may want to restrict access to your database by adjusting permissions. You'll want to be careful not to confuse FILE SYSTEM permissions with WEB SERVER permissions. The Internet account, typically IUSR_[MACHINENAME], must have read and write access to the database within the FILE SYSTEM in order for webCal to function. This should be the default configuration, meaning you won't need to change it.
The permissions you DO want to change are those of the WEB SERVER. This can be done through the Management Console. Within the Management Console, right-click on the webCal database, select it's properties, and disable "read" access. If anyone guesses the path to and name of your database, they won't be able to read (ie download) it.
If you are able to move files to locations outside of the web root (often /inetpub/wwwroot) then you may want to move the webCal database to a directory that's not part of the web site. This makes it impossible for anyone to guess the path to your database and download it since only folders beneath the web site are accessible to Internet users. If you do move the database then you will need to update webCal3_data.inc so that it points to the new location. For example, if you move the file to c:\mydata then you would need to change this line
DSN = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" _
& Server.Mappath("data/" & DataName & ".mdb")
to
DSN = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" _
& "c:/mydata/" & DataName & ".mdb"
Thank you for purchasing webCal. I welcome any questions or feedback that you may have.
Jason Abbott