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The Design of Software (CLOSED)

Hello All,

my first post here ;)..

I've a small system running on shared web hosting with SQL server as DB.

My issue is that I want to send out periodical alerts to my users based on their criteria, that they store in DB.

oneway is to invoke it by admin action through an asp file. but that is manual and ugly and would require someone to invoke it on a daily basis at fixed time.

what are other options? specially considering shared hosting.

Some shared hosts offer cron job support, if yours doesn't perhaps you should switch.

You should ask your hosting provider about cron - I've worked with providers that will enable cron when asked, but which don't advertise it as a feature.

I've a windows host will cron work on windows? really don't know much about cron just searched google.

The Windows equivalent is "Scheduled Tasks".  (I don't know whether Windows hosting providers typically support that or not.)

at, never forget the command line. :)

But I doubt any shared host would let you run that.

DotNetNuke has a scheduling module. You might want to take a look at that.

What it basically does is, on every request, see if any of their trigger times have run out. If it has, go launch another thread to do whatever needs doing.

The down side of course is that if there's no traffic, nothing happens.

In addition to the Windows Task Scheduler (as cron), SQL Server has the SQLAgent that will allow you to create and schedule jobs. Whether they'll open that up to you or now, well ... that's a question you'll have to take up with them.

Hmmm. Seems to me that scheduling could be a service an ISV that already has a server hooked up to the net and that has cron could offer to other ISVs/websites who dont?

Subscribers to the scheduler service would configure the url they want hit at prespecified intervals/times. They could also specify things like http basic passwords and so forth.

You could also offer a soap interface through which the server being hit can programatically call back to the scheduler service to set up a schedule.

Whether such a service is financially worthwhile to implement is another matter, but if you bundled in with some other stuff, perhaps it could be?

While roaming around the net I found this.. don't u think it would be pretty useful

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/ASPNETService.asp#xx1275964xx

the only thing my App is all in ASP instead of ASP.net.

sorry do have to ask the hosting provider. haven't gotten around to do it.

Great help guys.

my host will schedule a task at webserver to run my asp or asp.net file.. thats great all I need.

If anyone needs to know I'll post the name of host.