Data-Driven Websites for Very Small Businesses

Question

I have a client who has a product-based website with hundreds of static product pages that are generated by Microsoft Access reports and pushed up to the ISP via FTP (it is an old design). We are thinking about getting a little more sophisticated and creating a data-driven website, probably using ASP.NET MVC.

Here's my question. Since this is a very small business (a handful of employees), I'd like to avoid enterprise patterns like web services if I can. How does one push updated product information to the website, batch-style? In a SQL Server environment, you can't just push up a new copy of the database, can you?

Clarification: The client already has a system at his facility where he keeps all of his product information and specifications. I would like to refresh the database at the ISP with this information.

Answer 1

Why do you need to push anything?

You just need to create a product management portion of the webpage and a secondly a public facing portion of the webpage. Both portions would touch the same SqlServer database.

Answer 2

.Net has the ability to monitor a database and check for updates. then you can run a query to [push] the data elsewhere.

or use sql to push the data with a trigger on the table(s) in question.

Is this what you were looking for?

Answer 3

If you are modernizing, and it is a handful of employees, why would you push the product info out batch style?

I don't know exactly what you mean by "data driven", but why not allow the ASP.NET app to query the SQL Server product catalog database directly? Why generate static pages at all?

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UPDATE: ok, I see, the real question is, how to update the SQL database running at the ISP.

Answer 4

You create an admin panel so the client can edit the data directly on the server. It is perfectly reasonable to have the client keep all their records on the server as long as the server is backed up nightly. Many cloud and virtual services offer easy ways to do replicated backups.

The additional benefit of this model is that more than one user can be adding or updating records at a time, making the workforce a lot more scalable. Likewise, the users can log in from anywhere they have a web browser to add new records, fix mistakes made in old records, etc.

EDIT: This approach assumes you can convince the client to abandon their current data entry system in favor of a centralized web-based management panel. Even if this isn't the case, the SQL database can be hosted on the server and the client's application could be made to talk to that so you're only ever using one database. From the sounds of it, it's a set of Access forms and macros which you should have source access to.

Answer 5

You can try Dynamic Data Web Application.

Answer 6

You don't mention what exactly the data source is, but the implication is that it's not already in SQL Server. If that's the case, have a look at SSIS.

If the source data is in SQL Server, then I think you'd want to be looking at either transactional replication or log shipping to sync the two databases.

Answer 7

Assuming that there is no way to sync the data directly between your legacy system DB (is it in Access, or is Access just running the reports) and the SQL Server DB on the website (I'm not aware of any):

The problem with "pushing" the data directly into the SQL server will be that "old" (already in the DB) records won't be updated, but instead removed and then recreated. This is a big problem with foreign keys. Plus, I really don't like the idea of giving the client any access to the db at all.

So considering that, I find that the best is to write a relatively simple page that takes an uploaded file and updates the database. The file will likely be CSV, possibly XML. After a few iterations of writing these pages over the years, here's what I've come up with:

1. Show file upload box.

2. On next page load, save file to temp location

3. Loop through each line (element in XML) and validate all the data. Foreign keys, especially, but also business validations. You can also validate that the header row exists, etc. Don't update the database. 3a. If invalid data exists, save an error message to an array

4. At the end of the looping, show the view. 4a. If there were errors, show the list of error messages and tell them to re-upload the file. 4b. If there were no errors, create a link that has the file location from #2 and a confirmation flag

5. After the file location and confirm flag have been submitted run the loop in #3 again, but there's an if (confirmed) {} statement that actually makes the updates to the db.

EDIT: I saw your other post. One of the assumptions I made is that the databases won't be the same. ie, the legacy app will have a table or two. Maybe just products. But the new app will have orders, products, categories, etc, etc. This will complicate "just uploading the file".

Answer 8

You should have a service that regularly updates the data in the target DB. It will probably run on your source data machine (where the Access-DB is)

The service can use SSIS or ADO.NET to write the data. You can do this over the web, because you have access via TCP/IP to the server I assume.

Please check when the updates are done and how long it takes. If you can do the updates during the night you are fine. If not you should check, if you can still access the web during the import. That is sometimes not the case.

Answer 9

Use wget to push the new data file to the mvc app and once the data is received by the action, the mvc app invokes the processing/importing of the data (maybe in a worker process if you dont want long requests).