Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the Lasso 9 documentation, the section outline, and documentation conventions.

• Lasso 9 Documentation describes the documentation included with Lasso 9 products.

• Lasso 9 Language Guide describes the volumes and sections.

• Documentation Conventions includes information about typographic conventions used within the documentation.

Lasso 9 Documentation

The documentation for Lasso 9 products is divided into several different manuals and also includes several online resources. The following manuals and resources are available.

• Lasso 9 Setup Guide is the primary manual for Lasso 9. It includes documentation of the architecture of Lasso, installation instructions and the administration interface. After the release notes, this is the first guide you should read.

• Lasso 9 Language Guide includes documentation of the language used to specify programming logic, access data sources, and much more.

• Lasso 9 Reference provides detailed documentation of each method in Lasso. This is the definitive reference to the Lasso language. This reference is provided as a LassoApp included with Lasso 9 Server and also as an online resource from the LassoSoft Web site.

LanguageReference

Comments, suggestions, or corrections regarding the documentation may be sent to the following email address.

documentation@lassosoft.com

Lasso 9 Language Guide

This is the guide you are reading now. This guide contains information about programming in Lasso and how to build web applications using Lasso 9 Server. It is organized into the following sections.

Programming Fundamentals

The first section of the Language Guide introduces the Lasso language and explains fundamental programming concepts. These concepts include variables, conditional logic, query expressions and other looping constructs. It also covers defining methods, types and traits and error handling.

Built-in Data Types

This section describes the data types included along with Lasso. It details the methods available on the built-in string and bytes types, as well as integer and decimal operations, files, networking and much more.

Web Applications

This section introduces the functionality provided by Lasso 9 Server for building web applications. It covers the methods for retrieving web request related data and for building a response to be sent to the client. It describes how to deal with content types, POST and GET parameters, file uploads, and how to preserve client session related data. This section also details how file paths are treated during a web request, and how to execute additional files during the handling of a request.

Additionally, this section documents extra functionality available for applications written with Lasso 9 Server. This functionality includes: logging, email sending via SMTP, POP email retrieval, data encryption and more.

Database Interaction

This section details the inline database abstraction system. It describes how to search, add, update and delete database rows using this abstraction system. It also shows how to execute raw SQL statements on a database and how to advance through a result set and access database column data.

Threading

In this section, Lasso's threading implementation is described and the means for creating and interacting with threads is detailed.

Extending Lasso with C

This section describes how to add functionality to Lasso using the Lasso C API (LCAPI). LCAPI can be used to integrate external libraries or to speed up complex yet critical portions of an application.

Extending Lasso with Java

Includes instructions for extending the functionality of Lasso by creating new tags, data types, and Web server connectors written in Java.

Documentation Conventions

The documentation uses several conventions in order to make finding and understanding information easier.

Definitions are indicated using a bold, sans-serif type face for the defined word. This makes it easy to find defined terms within a page. Terms are defined the first time they are used.

Cross References are indicated by an italicized sans-serif typeface. For instance, the current section in this chapter is Documentation Conventions. When necessary, arrows are used to define a path into a chapter such as Chapter 1: Introduction > Documentation Conventions.

Code is formatted in a narrow, sans-serif font. Code includes HTML tags, Lasso source code, and any text which should be typed into a Lasso page. Code is represented within the body text (e.g., column) or is sometimes specified in its own indented section of text, as follows:

   column('Company_Name')

Code Results represent the result after code is processed. They are indicated by a blue arrow and will usually be the value that is sent to the client's Web browser. The following text could be the result of the code example above.

    LassoSoft

Notes are included to call attention to items that are of particular importance or to include comments that may be of interest to select readers. Notes may begin with: 'Warning', 'FileMaker Pro Note', 'Apache 2 Note', etc., to specify the importance and audience of the note.