ASP Documentation Tool – Free Documentor For Classic ASP
April 2023: The ASP Documentation Tool is now available for free. Please bear in mind the software is unsupported and I am unable to provide updates, fixes or technical support because the tools I used to build it no longer work on my PC. If you have any questions then post a comment below and I’ll do my best to answer them.
The ASP Documentation Tool creates documentation from Active Server Pages (ASP) source code. Since version 1.0 was released in 2002, hundreds of organisations worldwide have come to depend on this useful tool to quickly document their ASP web applications.
Note that there’s also a similar tool for documenting .NET Framework code.
Benefits:
- Saves an enormous amount of time compared to creating documentation by hand.
- Helps you to understand complex legacy website code.
- Assists with the migration of classic ASP websites to other technologies such as ASP.NET.
- Works on any version of Microsoft Windows (VB6 runtime files required).
Key features:
- Documents ASP code written in both VBScript and JScript.
- Also incorporates external client-side JavaScript and Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) files in the documentation.
- Creates documentation in HTML [sample], HTML Help [sample] and text formats [sample].
- Built by an experienced web developer with 15 years of web development experience.
- Supports large projects spread over multiple folder locations.
- Documents Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server databases associated with the ASP project. Includes documentation for Tables, Views and Stored Procedures.
- Documents COM objects associated with the project (requires original source code).
- The tool is configured and runs from a Graphical User Interface. A command line interface is also available for batch building of documentation.
- Specifically documents ASP Pages, Functions, Subroutines, Constants, Application and Session Variables, Request Variables, Cookie usage, Redirection usage, Forms and email addresses. Also shows where COM objects are instantiated (e.g. through CreateObject calls).
Code review features:
- Shows the proportion of JavaScript, HTML and ASP script used in each page.
- Shows unused ASP functions, allowing redundant code to be identified.
- Shows functions that aren’t called very often.
- Shows under and over-commented regions of code.
- Identifies pages that use rarer ASP scripting languages like Python or PerlScript.
Screenshots and Documentation Examples
The ASP Documentation Tool offers an easy to use graphical user interface:
The tool may also be run from the command line:
Documentation may be created in a number of different formats. Below is a screenshot of the documentation in HTML format:
This may be viewed in any web browser, and is useful for incorporating into Intranets or support Wikis.
Documentation can also be created in Microsoft’s HTML Help format. Documentation in this format is fully cross-referenced and also searchable. It is also compressed into one, easily portable .chm file. Below is a screenshot of ASP source code documentation created in HTML Help format:
Finally the tool creates basic documentation in text format this can be useful if you’re asked to provide your own specific documentation for a web application:
- Download the ASP Documentation Tool today, and find out how much time you can save when documenting and understanding your legacy classic ASP web applications.
