What They Are Normally, web documents are sent
to the browser of the person who requests them (the client) as regular text files.
HTML tags in the document are parsed by the browser of the client to format the
page. In order to include dynamic content in the documents that can change
each time the document is served, a web server can be told to parse, or look for
and execute, commands that are present in the document before it is sent to the
client's browser. Some of the things that these commands to the server can
do are: - print the current date and time or the date and time that
the file was last modified
- include the contents of a particular file
- execute
a cgi script
Using Server Side Includes at PRIMUS PRIMUS's
web servers running the Apache web server are configured to parse any documents
that are named with the file extension .shtml. Commands to the server
always conform to the following format: <!--#command attribute=value-->
Below are some useful commands that can be included within
.shtml documents. include The include command inserts
a text file into the parsed file. This can be a CGI script if the CGI script outputs
HTML. It can also just be another HTML document. The permissions on the included
file must be set to allow access to the user requesting it. The include
command can be used in one of two ways: <!--#include virtual="/path/to/file/to/be/included.html"-->
or <!--#include file="relative/path/from/current/directory"--> echo The
echo command prints data from a specific variable. For example, you can
print the date at the time (local time zone) that the document is loaded. The
command looks like this: <!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL"--> (var
stands for variable) and will return the following output: Wednesday, 20-Aug-2008 10:06:42 EDT
Other values you can use for the var attribute include: - DATE_GMT
- same as DATE_LOCAL but in Greenwich Mean Time
- DOCUMENT_NAME - name of
current document
- DOCUMENT_URI - virtual path to current document
- LAST_MODIFIED
- date that current file was last modified
as well as any variables
in the CGI Variables set. fsize The fsize command prints
the size of a given file. The attributes accepted for fsize are the same
as those used for the include command. For example, to print the file size
of this document, I would use the following command: <!--#fsize
file="ssi.html"--> the output would look like this: 5k
flastmod flastmod prints the date that a given file was
last modified. The attributes are the same as those for include and fsize.
To see when this document was last modified, you would use a command like this:
<!--#flastmod file="ssi.html"--> to get the following output: Thursday, 31-Oct-2002 13:55:06 EST
exec For security reasons, PRIMUS does not allow the exec
command to be used in server parsed HTML documents. If you would like to use SSI
to include a CGI Script, the include command will work just fine. Just
include the path to the CGI Script as if it were any other document.
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