I have web app code in VS2010 that is manually executed every night. One of the developers manually runs the code in VS, when the web page opens, presses a few buttons etc.. and executes the code to get our required results. How can we automate this process so as to eliminate any human element. Ideally, I am looking for a way to have the code execute automatically at a given time during the day. What is involved in getting something like this to work?
A WCF service is a possible solution:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms734712.aspx
Windows has scheduled tasks which is good at... scheduling tasks.
Do you (or plan to) have a big test of GUI tests? There are entire tools dedicated to GUI automation testing. I'd recommend looking into one of those if this is going to be a big part of your overall test strategy.
If this is a one-time thing, you could schedule the running of a simple C# application that hosts a Web Browser control, that points to your web site. In this sense, the Web Browser control acts as your browser. You can send JavaScript commands to it etc.
Web Browser documentation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.webbrowser.aspx
Another alternative is to schedule an AutoHotKey script to simulate the key pressing and mouse clicks. This works well. I used to use it to rack up Farmville points (no joke).
http://www.autohotkey.com/
A Windows service seems better in the sense of "scheduled" and "no intervention." A WCF service is still, by default, listening and waiting for interaction (hosting the service). Or just schedule a simple app or script to do what you need.
Can you tell us a little more about this process? My initial recommendation would be to transition that code from a web application into a command line utility and then use windows task scheduler. If for some reason there are heavy dependencies within that web app that make that impossible I would consider taking those button click events and turning them into web services that you could then call programmatically from a command line application.
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I have an asp.net mvc 2 app, and I need to run a task (call WS, save into db) once a day. What is the suggested way for this? One thing, I have a feeling I would like to execute this task from within the webapp.
Does anyone have any suggestions:
I was considering .net quartz or regular System.Timers.Timer?
Does anyone see any problems?
Any other better solutions?
Thanks a lot
--MB
Why do you want to run this from the webapp? You have no way of even knowing if the webapp will be running at the required time. I would recommend you look at Windows Services
web apps are not the best host for a scheduled task. Unless you implement a system to keep the process awake, there's no chance to be sure your schedule will be executed.
Quartz.net is good for that.
It consists in a core module which you can use in your web app to save tasks and a server (windows service) module which executes your scheduled jobs.
I've recently implemented my own windows services and used Sql Server as storage for my scheduled jobs. Everything works pretty well, even if, I had to struggle a little bit to put things together.
The documentations is not always so clear.
Have a look at Quartz.Net, which is available as a NuGet package or from their site.
There are lots of examples of how to set these up, they are very flexible, you just have to define a class which implements IJob with a single Execute() method which gets fired by your choice of triggers.
You could also consider using Windows Workflow Foundation.
I have downloaded TheWorldsWorstStackOverflowClone. One of the project is called TheWorldWorsts.ApiWrapper, which basically is the core of accessing the API. There is a class called ApiProxy.cs, which has all the methods for the API call. This is good.
Now what I want to do is I am trying to collect data from this API interface and store it in a database. I know the limit to the API call is 10k per day. I.e: I want to be able to call the method in the ApiProxy class 10k times per day, done automatically. How can I do this?
The non-automatic way would be to create a dummy site where when every time I access the site it does all that process, but this not efficient. It seems that I have to write some kind of a scheduler by deploying a web service, but that is too complicated... as explained here. Any other simpler methods?
A Windows Service or Desktop App might be a better solution than a web application. You are not deploying a web service, you are consuming one using a proxy class, and this does not require you to have a web server or a web site.
You could use a web application to control and monitor progress as your service downloads data, but the actual work is long running and needs to be offloaded to another process or thread so you can tell the user whats going on.
Check out this one
http://stacky.codeplex.com/
This looks what you need, though I am facing some debugging issues, but hope you can figure it out.
I am writing a web application in ASP.NET 3.5 that takes care of some basic data entry scenarios. There is also a component to the application that needs to continuously poll some data and perform actions based on business logic.
What is the best way to implement the "polling" component? It needs to run and check the data every couple of minutes or so.
I have seen a couple of different options in the past:
The web application starts a background thread that will always run while the web application does. (The implementation I saw started the thread in the Application_Start event.)
Create a windows service that is always running
What are the benefits to either of these options? Are there additional options?
I am leaning toward a windows service because it is separated and can run on a different server (more scalable) as well as there is more control over when it is started/stopped, etc. However, I feel like the compactness of having the "background" logic running in the process of the web application might make the entire solution more understandable.
I'd go for the separate Windows service primarily for the reasons you give:
You can run it on a different server if necessary.
You can start and stop it independently of the web site.
I'd also add that it could well have some impact on the performance of the web site itself - something you want to avoid.
The buzz-word here is "separation of concerns". The web site is concerned with presenting the data to the user, the service with checking the integrity of the data.
You can also update the web site and service independently of each other should you need to.
I was going to suggest that you look at a scheduled task and let Windows control when the process runs, but I re-read your question and noted that you wanted the checks to run every couple of minutes. The overhead of starting the process might be too great in this case - though some experimentation would probably prove this one way or the other.
If you use a scheduled task there's also the possibility that you could start the next check before the current one has finished - something you can code for if you're in complete control.
Why not just use a console app that has no ui? Can do all that the windows service can and is much easier to debug and maintain. I would not do a windows service unless you absolutely have to.
You might find that the SQL Server job scheduler sufficient for what you want.
Console application does not do well in this case. I wrote a TAPI application which has to stay in the background and intercept incoming calls. But it did it only once because the tapi manager got GCed and was never available for the second incoming call.
I'll try to be brief.
What is the best practice for calling a routine from an asp.net web application that initiates a lengthy 'background' process that must be run?
For example, I want to click a button on my webpage that says "Run data conversion" (for example). This data conversion routine may take 20-40 minutes to run, so it seems to me putting all that code into a asp.net web page is not the way to go....there is no need to run this background process thru the IIS server. A sperate service or app etc seemx the way to go...
The web app, and the background process will both run on my dedicated Win2003 server so I have lots of options - but what is the best one?
If you control the server, I would suggest creating a windows service - take the data conversion task outside of ASP.NET altogether; you wouldn't want ASP.NET restarting halfway through a 40 minutes conversion routine.
There are quite a few options, basically it boils down to you needing any sort of process that you can communicate with. The options I can think of off the top of my head are; a web-service running under another application pool; a windows service; a command-line process started by your ASP.NET code.
The next question is how to communicate with the other process. If you're using a database you could set up two common-tables that both processes can access. The website would place the request for work into a table that the second process would monitor. A second table could then be used for the results, which the web-site would monitor. Another option would be to use something like the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) or .NET remoting to send events between the processes.
I have a website that's running on a Windows server and I'd like to add some scheduled background tasks that perform various duties. For example, the client would like users to receive emails that summarize recent activity on the site.
If sending out emails was the only task that needed to be performed, I would probably just set up a scheduled task that ran a script to send out those emails. However, for this particular site, the client would like a variety of different scheduled tasks to take place, some of them always running and some of them only running if certain conditions are met. Right now, they've given me an initial set of things they'd like to see implemented, but I know that in the future there will be more.
What I am wondering is if there's a simple solution for Windows that would allow me to define the tasks that needed to be run and then have one scheduled task that ran daily and executed each of the scheduled tasks that had been defined. Is a batch file the easiest way to do this, or is there some other solution that I could use?
To keep life simple, I would avoid building one big monolithic exe and break the work to do into individual tasks and have a Windows scheduled task for each one. That way you can maintain the codebase more easily and change functionality at a more granular level.
You could, later down the line, build a windows service that dynamically loads plugins for each different task based on a schedule. This may be more re-usable for future projects.
But to be honest if you're on a deadline I'd apply the KISS principle and go with a scheduled task per task.
I would go with a Windows Service right out of the gates. This is going to be the most extensible method for your requirements, creating the service isn't going to add much to your development time, and it will probably save you time not too far down the road.
We use Windows Scheduler Service which launches small console application that just passes parameters to the Web Service.
For example, if user have scheduled reports #388 and #88, scheduled task is created with command line looking like this:
c:\launcher\app.exe report:388 report:88
When scheduler fires, this app just executes web method on web service, for example, InternalService.SendReport(int id).
Usually you already have all required business logic available in your Web application. This approach allows to use it with minimal efforts, so there is no need to create any complex .exe or windows service with pluggable modules, etc.
The problem with doing the operations from the scheduled EXE, rather than from inside a web page, is that the operations may benefit from, or even outright require, resources that the web page would have -- IIS cache and an ORM cache are two things that come to mind. In the case of ORM, making database changes outside the web app context may even be fatal. My preference is to schedule curl.exe to request the web page from localhost.
Use the Windows Scheduled Tasks or create a Windows Service that does the scheduling itself.