Develop Reference

ASP.net Schedule Post like Facebook

Im trying to do something similar to the Scheduling of posts for Facebook pages... on ASP.net/c#
So basically what i need is :
User fills a few text boxes
Selects a date...
The post gets posted on that date...
I am unable to really understand the logic as well as coding for this...
What i have thought so far is, once the user submits the post, store the details in a table in SQL like SheduledPosts, and when the CurrentDate(Server Date) matches the date....
Transfer the SQL entry from there to the actual PostTable.
Now the actual process needs to take place without any pages loading or any actions done by the user... So I also dont understand how to make it happen from the server side...
Please note that im not trying to post anything to facebook... rather, trying to do a schedule form submitting on my own asp.net website...
Any help regarding the logic, coding, scheduling will be greatly appriciated...
Thank You

I can think of a couple of different ways to accomplish this:
Implement a "pending posts" table and have a separate process running on the server to take care of transferring the post from the "pending posts" table to the "current posts" table at the appropriate time.
Add a "publish_on" datetime field to your current posts table, and when selecting items to be displayed in the page output, add a "WHERE publish_on IS NULL OR publish_on > GETDATE()" clause to your query. You fill this in for posts you don't want going live until a particular time.
Personally, I would go with the second approach, since I think it's a more elegant solution.

You can do this with one table. Just have a 'Submitted' date field (for your records), a 'Publish' date field and a Boolean 'Published' field. Create a Windows Service to run every 5 minutes or so and let the service perform the date check; when it finds one that satisfies the date criteria, it just toggles the Boolean field to 'true' and your page logic can then display the post.
Here is a walk-through on creating a simple Windows Service:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zt39148a%28v=vs.110%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

asp.net calendar is too slow on OnDayRender

I have a calendar in my asp.net application. OnDayRender I need to bind a value for each specific day from the database. So, I establish a connection to the db for each day. And, this slows down the system a lot. What would be a better way of doing this? How can I get these data for all month at once and display it appropriately?
Thanks!

Instead of doing the database query in OnDayRender, do it when your form initially loads, and fetch the data for the whole month (or whatever the range of the calendar is) into a List or something similar. Then your OnDayRender code can just fetch the data from the list.
It's hard to say more than that without a better idea of what you're doing, but that's the gist of it: fetch all the relevant data from the database into memory at the start, and then grab individual days from memory when you need them.

Get database record automatically at a specific time

I have a task that basically I don't know how to accomplish it and I want some advice from you guys : I have a database that contains many binary images and a website that has a button.
When I press it a select statement is executed to search all the newly inserted rows after a specific date and send it to the website to process. My boss asked me if there is any way I can do that process manually by using a web service or anything else like a trigger in the database that automatically searches for new rows after a specific date and sends the new rows to the web site.
I don't know if I explained what I need. My main question is it possible to do this and what is the best way to achieve it. one more thing if it is achievable can I trigger it to work every day at a specific time ? Thank you

As I understood you question, these are the requirements:
You need to automate the process that is now manually triggered by clicking the button on the web page
The simplest way to do this in my opinion would be to create a small Console application and install it on a suitable server. Then on the server create a Windows task scheduler (Google it unless you're already familiar with it) task that runs the console application on a suitable schedule.
You could for instance have it run once every night at say 10 minutes past midnight and it would fetch all images from the past day and "send them to be processed".

First of all you have to understand website is not a repository of records but it works based on user requests. So in your website if you want to change contents on web pages, try AJAX reqeusts. If you are looking for some options to update details in other systems periodically think of eitehr Windows services, or cron jobs or may be SSIS jobs etc.

Use Cursor and Trigger but u have to store date in database which u want display on particular date

Storing variable number of items in a database

I am using ASP.NET and Razor to create a calendar application similar to Google calendar and was hoping to get some feedback on my design thus far. My idea is to have 2 tables, one normal table for users, and another for a table of events which will store the users id and the time of the event, event ID, name of the event, and duration of the event.
I plan to write some code that will display a calendar on screen and allow the user to select multiple times so as to mark them as busy and give them a name. When this is done, the user submits the information and it is inserted into the database.
What is the best way to go about tackling this calendar construct? I can't really think of a simple way. I am guessing I can create a nice looking calendar using HTML and CSS, and perhaps JS to allow the drag and drop functionality? I suppose when the user selects a time, an object would be created with a start time and default duration, then when they drag it the duration changes. I am confused by how you would do this however, pulling objects out of thin air. How does Google Calendar do this?
And then how do you store all of the created objects in the database? I am guessing that Razor has a foreach construct and that I could just iterate over all objects created and insert them into the database one-by-one?
Also, how could I clean up the database, garbage collecting events that have already transpired while keeping events that are constant ie daily/weekly?
Apologies if the question is vague, if it is too vague then please press me on details I can be more clear on rather than close this. Thank you.

What is the best way to go about tackling this calendar construct?
If you are wondering about data structure here, whatever you do, do it in that way that it makes it compatible with standard iCalendar standard
I can't really think of a simple way.
Calendars are quite complex applications, there is no simple way. (events, sharing events, tentative, attendants, reminders...)
I am guessing I can create a nice looking calendar using HTML and CSS, and perhaps JS to allow the drag and drop functionality?
Yes.
I suppose when the user selects a time, an object would be created with a start time and default duration, then when they drag it the duration changes. I am confused by how you would do this however, pulling objects out of thin air. How does Google Calendar do this?
You can find some existing jquery plugins for this (try with this for start, or take a look at this list).
And then how do you store all of the created objects in the database? I am guessing that Razor has a foreach construct and that I could just iterate over all objects created and insert them into the database one-by-one?
Check out these jquery plugins and see how do they communicate with the server side. You will end up making ajax requests and then making database queries in the database. Razor has nothing to do with database...also Razor has nothing to do with client side interaction, it just renders page and everything else is on the js side.
Also, how could I clean up the database, garbage collecting events that have already transpired while keeping events that are constant ie daily/weekly?
I would't delete anything from database...don't see a reason for that. Just grab all you have and fill in the calendar. User will always look at month/date/week...grab data for that period and show it. When he goes back one year, he will have all the data still available.

Have you met my friend, Google?
In particular, 4GuysFromRolla has a tutorial, and there is a nice looking open source calendar control with some tutorials that should get you well on your way.

Calendar Questions - Icalendar library, making a actual calendar

I have some questions regarding calendars
Is there any good calendar generates for either asp.net mvc or jquery. I would like to find something that can make calendars and have features like this.
Generates all the months (but of course only features the current month that is being displayed)
If the name of the calendar event is too long it cuts it off and if you click on it a popup comes showing you the full description
Ability to add a new task to the calendar. So when you click on it pops up a dialog box and you can fill out information.
So basically what Google calendar can do. You can add a task then it pops up with like where, time notifications area.
So is there any sort of solution like this for .net MVC or jquery? If not then I am willing to use other javascript frameworks if needed but rather not.
I checked out http://arshaw.com/fullcalendar/ and it really does not have everything I need.
I like this one http://www.redredred.com.au/projects/jquery-week-calendar/
Since it almost does what I want but the major draw back this is that it only does weeks not a full month.
Is there some sort of library that I can use to easily import google calendar data in, outlook calendar data in and basically any major calendar program.
I know that icalendar is like the standard format so is there a C# library that will like parse this stuff?
I going to need to store the calendar data in a database. How would the database table look like?

I think that for the client side, you are asking for a little too much, to be honest. Your best bet is find the one that does the most that you want out-of-the-box but has enough customization to allow for you to fill in the functionality you are looking for. Either that, or write the code from scratch. To be honest, you are rendering a table with some jQuery on the front end for client-side events. It's tedious, but shouldn't be overly difficult.
As for a .NET library to handle calendar formats, I recommend DDay's iCal. It has some issues and requires some understanding to get running, but it works (I use it myself for a site that I project iCalendar entries from).
As for the calendar in the database, that's really up to you. The minimal amount of information you need is a date field, obviously. I'd recommend something with an offset (SQL Server 2008 has the datetimeoffset) since you might want to take into account time zones. Beyond that, any information you want to store is up to you.
In response to chobo2's comment about how to get the data to appear in the appropriate column, when you render the table, you are going to have a 7 x 5 table (seven days, five rows). I would suggest tagging each of them with the date.
Then, as you render your table, when you render the cell, you look to see if you have any events for your date, if you do, then render the cell appropriately.

Why don't you start slightly less ambitiously? Google has a large team working on their calendar and for you to hope to replicate that without taking years will just end up with an unfinished project.
1
You said you didn't like FullCalendar but it does support 95% of the features you need from the calendar, minus actually clicking on days to add events.
FullCalendar is great for displaying
events, but it isn't a complete
solution for event content-management.
Beyond dragging an event to a
different time/day, you cannot change
an event's name or other associated
data. It is up to you to add this
functionality through FullCalendar's
event hooks
You get a dayClick event which you could use to add an event. I wouldn't bother though going this route though, and simply have a separate panel on the page with a text box for the name, a small icon which makes a Jquery UI calendar appear. It sounds low-tech but the pain of getting the click event working in all browsers would be a big task.
This textbox displays the full event name when you click on day which gets around your long text cropping issue. Alternatively this shows you a nice static html iCal-like solution which you may have looked at already.
Generating a month calendar for the year could be done statically using HTML instead of using jQuery.
2
If you stick to the iCalendar format for Outlook and Google, which both support it, then it's very easy to write a parser for that format as it's such a simple text format. This question has more details on making one, you could use an existing library for it.
3
A simple table of equivalent SQL types like below will be enough:
Events
Id
Name
Location
DateTime Start
DateTime End
bool IsRecurring
Recurring events will be the hardest part because of the calculations you have to perform to work out the next event. You don't store each occurrence in the database. Using the epoch for the calculations might help out, it's a technique Exchange uses.