Hi,

I have written a web application in ASP that accesses an SQL Server 2000 database.

I need to make the application automatically recognise when the current date is a particular pre-specified date, and perform a function at that time (in this case, the function will grab some email addresses from the database and send an auto-generated email to them).

In other words, I need a way to make my application continually monitor the date/time (in the background), and then spring into action when the specified date arrives.

Please can you tell me how to do this?

I have searched the web a bit, but have not turned up anything (perhaps I am not using the best keywords in my search).

Hope you can help.

Thanks,

Steve

Hi dear,

As far as i get you, you may want to generate some email messages based on a date criteria. Now in asp you cannot run a continuous loop in the background to check for dates etc.. because of stateless nature of web applications. instead you have to trap the events in your application to fire the codes for checking and generating emails. The best will be session events as they will occur frequently. The other obivous option is application level events.

Moreover you can create an include file having the code you want to execute for email and date check etc and include it at the top of all your asp pages. So it will execute with each request, even more frequent than session events. But it will slow down your application performance as well

cheers

Anubhav Kumar

Thank you, dear - but there must be a better way than that to do scheduled tasks...?

Can anyone else help me with this please?

Thanks.

Steve,

Why dont you write a vbscript that does this and add that in the OS scheduled task as a job, so that it runs once every day, and when it meets the required date, it should do what it is intended to. In ASP, AFAIK, You cannot do that. Instead you can write some application that runs as a service in windows to get this done. But for that you can't stick with ASP. If you are for it, you can try that with .Net to run as a service.

IMO, vbscript running as a scheduled job on windows should be the best bet to keep that simpler as fas as I understood your requirement.

Hope that helps.
Cheers!

_________________________
- Vijay G
Strive for Perfection