Schedule a job on a website

[infinitizon]

I really need a huge help. If you have ever used an sms portal before (I particularly like the one at smslive247.com and routesms.com; you may need to register first). The idea is that users should be able to say "ok I want to send a message on 12/May/2012 by 3:00pm" by entering the necessary data and close the site while the job runs in the background.

I have looked through the net but what I see is bogus examples which tend to make nonsense of my already novice knowledge in programming.

I would prefer a vb.net step by step example

Thanks in advance.

____________________
Men put up a strong face just to cover their weaknesses...good!
But a smile makes them live longer....
Which would you choose?

Think about it.

 

[gbaughma]

You probably wouldn't schedule the job to fire from the website.

More likely, you would have another application that fires every so often to see if there are messages to send.

I guess the way that I would go about it is to have my data written, and maybe a SQL Stored Procedure firing every 5 mins or whatever to see if there are messages within that time frame that need to be sent.

Just the way I'd do it... I'm sure there are 100 others.


Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg

http://parallel.tzo.com

 

[NESWalt]

What I have done in the past was have a web site where the user can 'schedule' the message and what it contains. They were warned however that they may not have the message fire off at exactly that time however... that was the EARLIEST that the message would be fired.

That website would then call a web service that logged the message in the database itself.

A windows service ran every 3 or 4 minutes, looked for any messages that were scheduled to be sent and sent them, marking them as sent so it wouldn't fire them again. Periodically, we would go through and clean up sent messages.

Walt
Ciber/NES

http://nespower.com

 

[infinitizon]

Thanks guys, your help is really invaluable.
@NESWalt: I seem to fancy your idea. Can you please explain what exactly I should do. Will the windows service look for a .aspx file somewhere wherein I will be storing my codes to execute? I realy dont have an idea of exactly what to do.

@gbaughma: I have thought of storing in the database and then creating a job on SQL server 2008 wherein I will store sms's to be sent. But If I do that, and the time is reached, will the stored procedure now open a webpage to run the SMS API?

Everything is yet confusing.

Help!!

Thanks for the anticipated help

____________________
Men put up a strong face just to cover their weaknesses...good!
But a smile makes them live longer....
Which would you choose?

Think about it.

 

[ralphtrent]

I have a process that does the following that may help you understand what you need to do to get this to work.

1. a windows service wakes up every 15 minutes and queries an sql table to see if there is any new request that need to be processed. This can be determined by an status indicator or time of day, etc. etc. etc.
2. the window service will then process any request it needs to
3. process is complete

Now how does a new request get put out there?
1. in my aspx site, i allow the user to create a request to have some data sent to them every so often (they determine how often).
2. when my service wakes up every 15 mintues , it will look to see is there request that i need to serve right now based on the time I am running and the timing of the request.

So at work, you are delayed 15 minutes of getting your information from the time that you requested to have it. I can adjust that 15 minutes as needed.

let me know if this still does not give you a heard start on your goal.