I was just reading an article on one of the "pure ASP" web sites about a trick that can be used to keep Access .MDBs within the web root.

What's done is (1) encrypt the .MDB and (2) rename it from filename.MDB to filename.ASP and (3) use DSNless connection string (everyone does that anyway right?) to access the database.

So I kind of tried the same thing with VFP. I created took an existing .dbf and .cdx, renamed the .dbf to .asp, and then put it inside a .dbc and copied everything to a web directory. Then I tried to access the ".asp" file from IE. What I got was a semiscrambled-but-readable textual version of the .dbf contents. So it almost works....

Then I started to think about using the CryptoAPI class from the UT file section to scramble the table, but then for any query I'd have to unscramble the whole thing. So what I am thinking now is I should come up with a scheme to scramble sensitive columns only, and then create a SP in the DBC for data create/read/update. But the downside to that is that I could only use the SP for data access, I couldn't SQL-Select on the fly.

Any thoughts on this?


Oh, the reason I was thinking of moving the .dbc/etc inside the web root (I have previously always kept them in a directory outside the web root) was because I have multiple web apps on the same box and keeping it all in the web root would make each site more portable.