Server Side Includes
TOC
Turn on Server Side Includes in IIS
Server Side Includes, or SSI, is a powerful, but not perfect, technology. It can be extremely useful, but it is not without drawbacks. Alternatives to SSI include various solutions that drive your site with scripting engines such as Python or PHP. The primary advantage of the technology is that it allows you to place code that is repeated throughout your site in a single file that can be included in multiple files. Thus you can do something such as write a menu only one time, and include that menu in multiple HTML files.
Open the control panel:Control Panel | Programs | Turn Windows features on or off
Select and turn on Internet Information Services | World Wide Web Services | Application Development Features | Server Side Includes.
The files you create should use a .SHTML extension.
Summary:
Windows Server 2008: Server Manager | Roles
Windows 7:
- Control Panel | Programs
- Turn Windows Features on or Off
- IIS | World Wide Web | App Devlopment
Some documentation.
See next slide for screen shot.
Syntax
To create an include, we use a syntax like this:
<!--#include file="iis.inc" -->
You simply insert information like that shown above whereever you want to include another file insider your HTML file. For instance, here is a complete HTML file with a server side include:
<html>
<body>
<p>Here is a server side include:</p>
<!--#include file="iis.inc" -->
</body>
</html>
The include file, which can have any name, but which in this case we call iss.inc, might look like this:
<p>This text will be included in another file</p>
If the file you want to include in another file is in your current directory, then use the syntax shown above. Often, however, you want to include a file in many different HTML files. In that case, it is often best to place this file in a single location, and refer to it with this syntax, where we replace the word file with the word virtual, and we trace our path from the root of the site:
<!--#include virtual="/includes/iis.inc" -->
The root of your site is often called html on Apache, and wwwroot on iis. There are, however, no hard and fast rules as to where the root of your site is located. Just think of it as the place where you put your main index file, the file that serves as the entry point for your entire site.
The Handler Mappings
By default, any file with a .shtml extension will be searched by the Apache Web Server for server side includes. On Linux, you can use a neat trick to bring other files. Create a .htaccess file with the following contents:
Options +Includes
AddType text/html .shtml
AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml
XXBitHack on
This key line here is XBitHack on, which states that any file with executable permissions will be searched for includes. This means that you can write the following to make the web server search a file for server side includes:
chmod x+ myfile.html
On Windows, I don't know a good way to do the same thing. Instead, we are forced to either rename our files to xxx.shtml, which can break links and cause confusion, or else we use Handler Mappings to treat all html files on a site or in a folder as potentially containing server side includes. Handler Mappers allow us to tell IIS how files with certain extensions, that is, files of certain types, should be processed.
First bring bring up the Inernet Information Server Manager. Select your site. Click on the Handler Mapping icon. Select Add Module Mapping. Fill it in as follows:
And set the Access to script.
If you group the entries in the Handler Mappings page by Path Type, you should also be able to find the Handler Mapping for .shtml files. You are essentially imitating what they did there. My reasoning is simple: Microsoft engineers defined what is done for .shtml files. If they don't know the right thing to do, then who does?
Figure X: The Handler Mappings Page in Internet Information Server. (Click to enlarge.)
In the above figure, our new entry is at the bottom center, with a path of .html. The .shtml entry created by the system when we turned on SSI, is just a line or two above it.