Guest Author - Lisa Shea

The INSERT command is very commonly used in ASP to add rows into a SQL database. Here is the syntax for inserting into your tables.

Let's say that you have built yourself a little guestbook, where visitors have a form in which they can enter their name and comments. You now want to insert that name and comments into the table "GUESTBOOK", to store them and show them to your other visitors. Your GUESTBOOK table has 3 fields:

guest_name
guest_comments
guest_date

So your ASP script starts out knowing the value of the name and comments. If you don't know how to get values from a form, read the Using ASP with Forms article. So you now have the variables GuestName and GuestComments filled in with what the user gave you.

Be sure to read about Handling Apostrophes in Input Fields to make sure your input fields are ready for use in SQL.

To do the update, you would use:

Set objCmd4 = Server.CreateObject ("ADODB.Command")
SQLText = "insert into guestbook values('" & GuestName & "', '" & GuestComments & "', '" & Now() & "'"
objCmd4.ActiveConnection = strConnect
objCmd4.CommandType = &H0001
objCmd4.CommandText = SQLText
objCmd4.Execute intRecords
Set objCmd4 = Nothing

This creates the connection, creates the insert statement, submits it, and then shuts down the connection. Note that the Now() command automatically inserts the current date/time, so you know when this user submitted their comment on your site.

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