Background File Copy process in ASP

Question

Hi All,

I have an application in classic ASP. On click of a button, it copies a file and its relative folder from one folder to another folder, and displays a link to user for the destination folder. User can click on link and get the file from destination folder. Now, I am facing problem with file and its relative folder size. I have some of them with size greater than 500MB. So, copy process takes so much time that my application gets Time Out error. **Is it possible to create some background process for copy? and when process completes it should fire some event. **

Cheers

Answer 1

This is a pretty lame solution, but a solution nevertheless: you could fire off an Ajax request to a separate ASP script to do the copying, and just put a really long timeout on that script. When this completes, it could, of course, update the calling page with an alert or notification to the user, but that very much depends on the user having enough patience to keep that browser window open.

Answer 2

Hi All,

The options I tried are,

1. Executing copy command from Shell, not effective because ASP page waits for shell command to finish.
2. Creating a trigger in SQL database which gets fired when a new row gets added into the table, and then copy the files and send an email to user using TSQL. This affects my overall database performance.
3. AJAX solution also waits for process to end.

Now the solution I have implemented is, ASP page just creates a request and displays a message to user that user will get an confirmation email, then I created a small windows application which keep on watching for any request generated by ASP page, and as soon as any request comes in, it starts copying the files and at end sends as email to user as confirmation.

This solution is working for my requirements, please do share if you have any better and robust solution for the scenario.

Cheers.

Answer 3

I thought of another idea. I'm not sure of the exact way to do this on an IIS server, but if I were running on a Linux server, I would set up a cron job to run a web script every 5 minutes or so. The script would check for new files and perform the copying. Since copying could take more than 5 minutes, you would probably need to keep track of files in an XML file or db or something.

This would free you from writing/maintaining a separate Windows desktop app.