[Chapter 5] 5.4 Including Boilerplates

5.4 Including Boilerplates

There are times when you will have certain information that you repeat in numerous documents on the server, like your signature, or a thank-you note. In cases like this, it's efficient to have that information stored in a file, and insert that file into your various HTML documents with the SSI include command. Suppose you have a signature file like the following stored in address.html:

<HR>
<ADDRESS>
<PRE>
Shishir Gundavaram              WWW Software, Inc.
White Street                    90 Sherman Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02115     Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140
shishir@bu.edu
The address information was last modified Friday, 22-Dec-95 12:43:00 EST.
</PRE>
</ADDRESS>

You can include the contents of this file in any other HTML document with the following command:

  <!--#include file="address.html"-->

This will include address.html located in the current directory into another document. You can also use the virtual parameter with the include command to insert a file from a directory relative to the server root:

<!--#include virtual="/public/address.html"-->

For our final example, let's include a boilerplate file that contains embedded SSI directives. Here is the address file (address.shtml) with an embedded echo command (note the .shtml extension):

<HR>
<ADDRESS>
<PRE>
Shishir Gundavaram              WWW Software, Inc.
White Street                    90 Sherman Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02115     Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140
shishir@bu.edu
The address information was last modified on  <!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED"-->.
</PRE>
</ADDRESS>

When you include this address file into an HTML document, it will contain your signature along with the date the file was last modified.


Environment Variables		File Statistics

CGI Programming on the World Wide Web

5.4 Including Boilerplates