Create a Wireless Phone Book in ASP

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Did you ever find yourself saying, "I wish I could convince my manager let me create this new application, that would benefit our entire company." By the time you finish filling out the request for a meeting (in triplicate) you get frustrated and get caught up troubleshooting a problem and forget what you wanted to do in the first place.

I found myself in the same situation one day. After hearing the hype about wireless services on television and radio I finally broke down and subscribed to get wireless web on my NEXTEL cell phone (nextel.com). What I found is that wireless web isn't flashy like most web pages it is text-based information delivered to your phone. Immediately my mind started going a mile a minute thinking about all the ways I could use wireless web in the workplace. This article illustrates just one way you can make use of wireless technology and aid co-workers by producing a searchable phone book, which can be accessed via web enabled wireless phones.

Some Examples
LISTING 1

Listing1 shows the example of the index.asp page you want users to hit when first requesting your wireless application. The first page will provide the user with the ability to enter a full or partial first or last name and submit information to the search page. In Listing1 we set a variable called my_title equal to My Company Search. I created this variable to make it easy for you to change the name so you can integrate this application into your company easily. After we set the variable my_title we need to tell the browser what type of information we are sending. The response.ContentType = "text/x-hdml" lets the browser know we are sending a HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language) document. The code in Listing1 gives you a basis for how to accept an input from the wireless device and pass it to a second page.
LISTING 2

In Listing2 we take the search term entered by the user and do a lookup against an access database. If the name is found results will be returned to the user in a list similar to a dropdown box found on a HTML web page. The user will be able to scroll through the users and select the user they wish to call. When the user finds the person in the list they select the call option. We set the call option in Example1.
SEE EXAMPLE 1

On Line 2 you see where we set the action and task, which allows us to have the wireless device dial the selected employee by pressing the call option. We pass the string $ch, which holds the phone number for the selected employee.

Conclusion While the push for wireless web application grows some companies still lack the resources or cojones to release a small wireless application like the web enabled phone book shown here.

Topics for further discussion:
Extending this application
Adding security/authentication

Database Design
create a table named: company_phonedirectory
create field: fname (text/varchar)
create field: lname (text/varchar)
create field: pnumber (text/varchar)
create a dsn pointing to the table called: phone make sure phone numbers are in the xxx-xxx-xxxx format

Click here to Download the database and asp files