Customizing Built-in Error Messages

Creating Custom Error Messages

The task of creating and implementing your own custom error messages consists of the following four steps:

1. Gather error numbers, globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) for each application, and country codes
2. Create Web pages that are linked to your custom error messages
3. Create the Active Server Pages (ASP) page for your custom error messages
4. Activate the custom error messages

Note   This process documents the use of an ASP page. If you want to use a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script, refer to your CGI reference manual for more information about CGI script.

At the end of this process, you have the following components:

• A functioning ASP page
• A set of Web pages that provides information about your custom error messages
• Updated Windows registries on users’ computers
• Functioning custom error messages

To create custom error messages or to modify default error messages, you need to create a server-side script to handle the custom error messages. This script can be in either ASP or CGI code. You can create the server-side script by using the following tools:

ASP generator   If you are going to create a small number of custom error messages, you can use the ASP generator (an Excel workbook called ASPscrpt.xls) to create an ASP page. An ASP page is the best choice when you’re running Microsoft Windows NT® Server and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).

Toolbox   The Office Resource Kit includes a file called ASPscrpt.xls to help you create your ASP script. Use this ASP generator to create the ASP file to handle your custom error messages. For information about installing this file, see Customizable Alerts.

Sample ASP script   There are also sample ASP pages and HTML files that you can modify to create your own ASP scripts.

Toolbox   The Office Resource Kit includes sample ASP scripts and HTML files to help you create custom error messages. Create your own ASP scripts and HTML files based on the files Alert.asp, Alert.htm, Alert2.asp, Alert2a.asp, and NYI.htm. For information about installing these files, see Customizable Alerts.

Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition or a CGI-based scripting tool   You can also use Visual Basic Scripting Edition or a CGI-based scripting tool to create a server-side script. The script is used to process the error message numbers, GUID numbers, and country codes, and to return a Web page containing a solution for the user.