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It's nice to have a complete project at your disposal to see how an application works when it's modified.

That's in an ideal situation. Now, say you have ftp access to a web site root with all the source files, you're unfamiliar with the site structure, you have no direct access to the database (so you can only guess the structure...) and the site just happens to be live.

How do you go about adding some features in a context like this?

P.S: Title is a reference to so-called keyhole surgery.

James P.
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Look through the source files and see if you can find any connection information for the database.

Kevin Bowersox
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  • That's an idea. Do you think that with this information it would be possible to see the table structure? A minimalistic viewer script probably exists for PHP but I don't know if such a thing exists for ASP.NET/C#. – James P. Jul 31 '11 at 13:46
  • If you find the connection information for the db, you can use relational db software specific to your apps db flavor to look at the db – Kevin Bowersox Jul 31 '11 at 14:32
  • Ok. Can this be done remotely? I know that a MySQL database requires port 3306 to be open (an ASP site probably use MS SQL Server...). Obviously most hosts block that. – James P. Jul 31 '11 at 16:20
  • @CodeInChaos' suggestion of simply dumping the database is a good one. I'll see if I can find a basic dumping script. – James P. Jul 31 '11 at 16:31
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If you're really into dissecting the webpage structure, you can go as far as writing or using a webpage parser and compare the site across its entire set of links. From there, you can pretty much make out the templates, content nodes, etc. Hope it helps.

Vern
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