I want to develop an Online Reminder service in ASP.NET 2.0 (C#) and SQL2005. But I am not getting the concept of reminder service. What I know is using an online reminder service I can schedule a reminder for future dates, which is sent to me (who schedule reminder) via email or SMS on that date. But in asp.net how to do this, caz anyone can schedule a reminder for any date, how we'll know that when to send that mail to the person. We have to put some loop or what.
So please guide me, what is the concept of an online reminder service and how I can easily develop this application using ASP.NET and SQL
Edited
I am on Shared hosting server, so that solution must be able to work on shared hosting.
Or
Please tell me if anyone knows about any FREE and open-source reminder service CMS which I can download and study it.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 have scheduling (sql jobs) and email features. You may even donot need to use ASP.NET.
Ideally, you would have a windows service that would periodically (every few minutes) check if any new reminders need to be sent out. Since you are on shared hosting, you probably can't install a service though.
I'm not very familiar with windows shared hosting, but if you have the option of creating scheduled/cron job type tasks you could probably do it that way.
If you can't create a scheduled task on your server, another option would be to create a scheduled task on your home PC with a program/script that runs every few minutes and simply hits a special web page on your site. That page could then have the code that checks for reminders and sends them out. It's a bit of a hack, but it should work.
Have a look at Quartz.Net (http://quartznet.sourceforge.net/). You can create an instance of the quartz scheduler in your Application_Start event and as long as the ASP.Net application is running, it will poll the database and trigger any functions you have registered with it. Since you are on a shared host environment, this is probably your best bet unless your hosting provider has a scheduler that can trigger a WebForm (or ASP.Net MVC Controller) periodically.
First you will obviously need to create a user interface and database to store the reminders. That part you got. The next step is to create a service which periodically queries the database for reminders that are due for notification.
The best way to do this is to write a lightweight Windows Service which, as you suggest, uses a loop and a reasonable sleep time (so as not to monopolize the CPU) to continually check the database for reminders and dispatches notifications. It then processes each reminder based on your requirements.
But since you are on shared hosting, you can't deploy a Windows Service, so the next best thing is to run a background thread on Application_Start of your global.asax. There are many examples of how to do this, e.g.:
http://www.west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/67557.aspx
What are some best practices for managing background threads in IIS?
Shared hosting will not work well with what you are trying to do. You could create a background polling thread on Application start, but it will get shut down at some point and may actually be prohibited by your hosting company. An infinite loop will most likely be detected by your hoster and result in your account being automatically shut down, especially if it is using a fair bit of CPU. As John suggests, there may be a scheduled tasks or hosted cron option with your ISP, but generally, those are just for doing things like nightly backups, not really having the level of granularity you need.
Simple answer is, you most likely need something other than a hosted account. You may need to look into a VPS shared hosting service or you may wish to consider looking into MS Azure or Amazon EC2. To do this right, you need to create an application, or better, a service that runs constantly, something a shared hosting account will not provide.
There also a few services out there who can call a specific web page on your service periodically. You could use that to make the page check if there are any reminders that need to be sent.
However since you're then relying on an external site you can't control this might not be the ideal solution if it is very important that the reminders are always being sent.
1) Create a database for storing messages, with a datestamp
2) Create an SQL job, that selects all messages in a time period
3) From the SQL job, you can initialize an .net based SQL Function, that would send out the emails with the System.Net.Mail namespace.
You might consider a 'hack' using the Cache expiration in for triggering events. Create new cache keys that expire at specific Date-Times to run the reminder or make it recur at defined intervals, checking a queue to see if anything new should be sent.
See:
Easy Background Tasks in ASPNET
Related
I have written a web application in asp.net. It has some user roles. There are 3 roles which are Manager, Accountant and Employee. The employees write their expenses in a form and send it to Manager. When manager approves it, it'll be sent to Accountant to pay it. I need to have an idea that when manager doesn't approve the employee's expense in 48 hours, it should send an automatic e-mail to Manager's mail.
I thought that I can write another small console application to handle that by checking every hour. But it would waste resources and decrease performance.
I need a good idea to handle that. How should I do?
There are several options, but if I were you I would go with first or second options.
Console App & scheduler
I would create that console application that every time is run perform the check for you.
Then I will have it run using Windows Scheduler in a daily basis (at 00:05) or a hourly basis if you prefer so. This way Windows Scheduler daemon will launch it every hour and the rest of the time your app is not running.
Check this Microsoft link to see how a scheduled task is created in windows.
Restful Web Service & scheduler
As suggested in #marapet answer, having a restful web service that allow you to perform this action instead of a console application would give you the advantage of having all code in your web application.
Similar as previous one, you should only invoke the restful uri to have your action done. As possible disadvantage, you have to get sure that that uri is not accessible to end users. In usual architecture (Web Server --> Application Server --> DB) this restful service should be in the Application Servers, far away from end user access.
Windows Service
Another option is creating a Windows Service that runs all the time and check the time itself so every hour perform the job (maybe using Quartz or similar). But this does not meet your performance requirements.
The performance hit will be small anyway as your service should check every minute to see if an hour has pass and is time to do its job.. a task pretty easy.
The advantage is that a windows service is easier to control and monitor than a Scheduled tasks
DB job
Yet another option... If your app uses SQL Server you can have a t-sql job that runs daily or hourly. I wouldn't recommend this option unless you really have performance problems.
The problem with this is that you would be splitting the logic and responsibilities of your code. A future developer or admin would find hard to maintain your app.
If you'd like to keep the logic within the web application for simplicity (depending on the total size of your solution, this may or may not be desired):
For a given URL, have the web app check for due approvals and sends emails out if needed. Be sure to keep track of emails sent in order to prevent sending the same email multiple times.
Call this URL in a regular interval. You may use a scheduled task or a third party url monitoring service to do this.
You may call the URL with a simple VBScript (or wget, or curl, or powershell, or whatever is fastest for you), which in turn you can automate by using the task scheduler (see also).
An example script in vbscript for calling an URL:
Function LoadUrl(url)
Dim objRequest
Set objRequest = CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0")
objRequest.open "POST", url , false
objRequest.Send
LoadUrl = objRequest.responseText
Set objRequest = Nothing
End Function
Checking every hour won't affect performance. Even checking every minute is probably fine, depending on your database. The simplest option is a console program fired as a Scheduled Task. You can also try a Windows Service but they're a bit trickier.
Also give some thought how you'll count the 48 hours. If an employee puts in expenses just before the weekend then 48 hours will probably elapse every time and you'll end up with a manager having lots of emails in their Inbox on Monday morning. That could cause some friction :)
I want to Scheduling in Asp.net
I have following options to implement this
To write SQLServer JOB(I dont want to do this.Dont want to go outside of .Net environment)
Second option is I will write windows service and this window service will call asp.net
webservice then this webservice calls asp.net method
(I also dont need to do this because my hosting provider might not be allow me to install
window service)
Third option is I call my scheduling method in Application_Start event in global class
(Drawback is, webserver will kill thread any time )
To call Scheduling Code in Page_Load event of Home Page(Might be nobody visits my website for hours
,Also page execution might be slow due to scheduling code)
I also found some online services that calls your page at given interval,some are given below
http://www.cronservice.co.uk/new/
http://scheduler.codeeffects.com
Anybody give me bettor solution of this and also explain why it is bettor?
Thanks in Advance
The ASP.NET application isn't the right place to implement scheduling. I would suggest creating a service or a scheduled task that runs in short intervals.
You don't have many options in a shared hosting environment. My host (WinHost) allows remote access to their database, so I was able to create an executable that ran on a local server with Task Scheduler.
The performance isn't great since the database is accessed over the internet, but it's still better than attempting to run pseudo scheduled tasks with ASP.NET.
Some hosts also offer a service that will request a url within your site on a scheduled basis. However, this didn't work for me because the task I had to run took longer than the request timeout.
There is no one solution that fits all. SQL jobs and windows jobs (scheduled thru windows task scheduler) are very widely used. In one of my previous work places they had jobs that ran on multiple platforms (mainframe,windows,sql server). Failure in some of these jobs, would cost in thousands by the day. So they employed something called ESP. This software monitored jobs on all platforms and sent a message to the control room in case of a failure.
If you throw some more light on the requirement, we might be able to help you better.
ASP.NET is not the right place to house your Scheduled Tasks. I'm using Quartz.net when I have to create Scheduled Tasks.
Create a page that launches your task and place it at the URL http://www.mydomain.com/runtask.
Create a scheduled task on your home PC that sends a request to http://www.mydomain.com/runtask.
You'll need to keep your home PC on all the time.
Ideally I would go with number 1 as you get full control/history/error reporting etc. You can write an SSIS job in .NET and have SQL server schedule it.
However, I have had a similar problem with shared hosting that is very restrictive. What I did was create a page which runs the process on page load (using validation in the querystring for security). I then used a machine I have which is always on to schedule a Windows Task Scheduler (this is part of Windows as standard) to call a bit of VB script that opens the browser and then shuts it.
I have a data loading application that has to be executed multiple times per day at irregular intervals. I am planning to write a service to kick off the downloads and import the data to a database server. Are there advantages to using a standard service over a webservice or vice versa?
I think you're missing the point here.
Web Services typically are used for a form of communication or remote execution. You call a remote function on a web-service to either adjust the behavior of the machine it's running on or to retrieve data from it.
Windows Services are background processes that run on a machine without any "logged on user" being required. They can perform tasks and do things while the user is at the login screen, or do elevated operations. You can talk to services to adjust their behavior or retrieve information, but it's general purpose is different than a webservice.
The biggest notable difference here is that web-services must be called, they don't run on their own.
For your application I would suggest using a Windows (Standard) Service, as you can have it execute code once per day. I would only use a web-service if you've got something else to automate the calls to the web-service and you require a response from the server detailing it's execution result (success/fail/warning/etc...)
You could also consider writing a normal (windows or console) application that is triggered by a Windows Scheduled Task. What you've described doesn't necessarily sound like something that would require a service.
Sounds like a good use of a windows service to me. Off the top of my head, I'd use a windows service if:
1. Work is performed on a scheduled basis (regular or irregular intervals) in the background;
2. No interaction is needed - work is just done in the background and kicks off based on polling or some other type of trigger (message dropped in queue, database value trigger, scheduled timespan, etc.);
3. Needs to be monitored (either starts/stops along with logging) and you can take advantage of WMI, perfmon and event log with little effort.
A web service is better for tasks that are interactive (like if you wanted to initiate the download based upon a request received).
Sounds like a windows service is the approach you should take.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
If "irregular interval" does mean, the application is invoked by another application, I would use a web service.
If the action is scheduled, I would use a windows service.
If you are working with SQL Server (scheduled or not), I would also consider SQL Server Integration Services.
I'm using c# to communicate with twitter and i need to code a schedule system to send twitter messages at a user defined date.
The messages to be sent are in a database with the date and time of deliver.
Which is the best method to check the db for scheduled messages and send it when the time arrives?
How accurate do you need the timing to be? Could you get away with polling the database every 5 minutes, saying "Tell me all the messages which need to be delivered before current time + 5 minutes" and then sending them all? (And marking them as sent in the database, of course.) Does it matter if they're a bit early or late?
You can do the scheduling on the C# side to make it more accurate, but unless you really need to I'd stick with a very simple solution.
(Depending on your database there may be clever ways of getting callbacks triggered etc... but again, I'd stick with the simplest solution which works.)
In addition to the windows service option (or background thread), you could just set up a scheduled task to run an app that polls the DB and sends the tweets once every defined interval.
Windows schedules can be setup using C# if needed and are really easy to set up manually.
There are several ways to do this, but I guess the best way is to set up a Windows Service that will periodically poll (frequency is up to you) the DB for any scheduled tweets that hasn't been sent.
Needless to say you'll need to handle scenarios such as the Internet connection or DB being down, etc.
In fact the solution consists in using a windows service but it can't communicate directly with the ASP.NET MVC app. I've added a Web Service that handles the task and a System.Threading.Timer in Windows Service to periodically call the Web Service.
Scenario: A WCF service receives an XDocument from clients, processes it and inserts a row in an MS SQL Table.
Multiple clients could be calling the WCF service simultaneously. The call usually doesn't take long (a few secs).
Now I need something to poll the SQL Table and run another set of processes in an asynchronous way.
The 2nd process doesn't have to callback anything nor is related to the WCF in any way. It just needs to read the table and perform a series of methods and maybe a Web Service call (if there are records of course), but that's all.
The WCF service clients consuming the above mentioned service have no idea of this and don't care about it.
I've read about this question in StackOverflow and I also know that a Windows Service would be ideal, but this WCF Service will be hosted on a Shared Hosting (discountasp or similar) and therefore, installing a Windows Service will not be an option (as far as I know).
Given that the architecture is fixed (I.E.: I cannot change the table, it comes from a legacy format, nor change the mechanism of the WCF Service), what would be your suggestion to poll/process this table?
I'd say I need it to check every 10 minutes or so. It doesn't need to be instant.
Thanks.
Cheat. Expose this process as another WCF service and fire a go command from a box under your control at a scheduled time.
Whilst you can fire up background threads in WCF, or use cache expiry as a poor man's scheduler those will stop when your app pool recycles until the next hit on your web site and the app pool spins up again. At least firing the request from a machine you control means you know the app pool will come back up every 10 minutes or so because you've sent a request in its direction.
A web application is not suited at all to be running something at a fixed interval. If there are no requests coming in, there is no code running in the application, and if the application is inactive for a while the IIS can decide to shut it down completely until the next request comes in.
For some applications it isn't at all important that something is run at a specific interval, only that it has been run recently. If that is the case for your application then you could just keep track of when the table was last polled, and for every request check if enough time has passed for the table to be polled again.
If you have access to administer the database, there is a scheduler in SQL Server. It can run queries, stored procedures, and even start processes if you have permission (which is very unlikely on a shared hosting, though).
If you need the code on a specific interval, and you can't access the server to schedule it or run it as a service, or can't use the SQL Server scheduler, it's simply not doable.
Make you application pool "always active" and do whatever you want with your threads.