Editing large text files via the web

Question

My asp.net 2.0 web site generates text files. Sometimes these files can get quite large. Under most cases the files are presented to the user, and approved without modification. However there are times when the end-user has to make changes to these files and submit the changed version back to the system.

Currently, when a file needs to be changed, I load the text into a textbox control, and I rewrite the file on postback. However I'm running into problems with OutOfMemory exceptions, invalid viewstate, etc.... These problems only occur when the file generated is large.

I beginning to think that I need another strategy for editing these files, but I'm at a loss as to which direction to take. Is there an ACTIVEX control that would serve me better? Should I abandon server side controls for this interaction and just deal with plain vanilla http posts?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Try Sharepoint.

Answer 2

One suggestion to consider would be an ajax call to a pagemethod that way you could just post the text file to the server without posting the whole page and the associated viewstate.

Answer 3

I am not sure about an activeX control, but you could use Silverlight. Thsi would allow you to stream the file to th Silverlight control, and then it could be edited on the clints machine, and when they are done, the chnages are sent back and stored by the server.

However, you will need to have .Net 3.5 on the server and make some changes to the web.config inorder to build against the 3.5 framework. If this is not acceptable, but you like the idea of doing stuff on the client side, you can also try using flash.

Answer 4

Can you break up the text files into sections and allow the users to submit changes one section at a time?