Ideas needed for design of web service or web app
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Hi all, Hoping for some bright ideas to help me decide how best to design and implement a piece of .Net work I am about to do for a client. Some background: my client runs many different job sites but they are all hosted by one company (who specialise in hosting job portals) but, unbeleivably, offer no way of uploading batches of jobs.... so each job must be entered on the site by hand. My client wants to get around this by allowing his clients (ie: companies wanting to place jobs on the various sites) to enter multiple job adverts in a spreadsheet and then (somehow) I need to take that s/sheet, read each job and create a URL which emulates the job entry page on the hoster's site (eg: www.[jobsite].com\newjob\addjob.jsp?title=Engineer&location=london&startdate=01-Jun-06... etc etc). The hosting site uses JSP so I can't do anything much from .Net except create a URL to submit each job... but at least we do know we can emulate the URL to submit a new job. So my task is really to somehow receive the s/sheet, build each URL and submit it. So my question is, given these requirements, how should I go about it? I was thinking of a web service which the clients placing jobs can call from their own browser but I don't know if a web service could read a s/sheet (I assume not). Failing that, I guess we could have an interim web page on a web server somewhere that allows the clients to upload and process the s/sheet. Other ways I thought of was allowing them to email the s/sheet as an Outlook attachment to an email address which would be monitored by a .Net service which would then do the reading and URL creation/submission. I guess what I'm trying to write here is almost middleware (I like to call it "squeezeware" as we're squeezing it in where nothing should really be!) so any ideas or comments on what I've suggested so far would be much appreciated. I'm not looking for anyone to do this for me - just after some fresh ideas! TIA for any help/suggestions... Mike -- modified at 20:55 Thursday 20th April, 2006
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Hi all, Hoping for some bright ideas to help me decide how best to design and implement a piece of .Net work I am about to do for a client. Some background: my client runs many different job sites but they are all hosted by one company (who specialise in hosting job portals) but, unbeleivably, offer no way of uploading batches of jobs.... so each job must be entered on the site by hand. My client wants to get around this by allowing his clients (ie: companies wanting to place jobs on the various sites) to enter multiple job adverts in a spreadsheet and then (somehow) I need to take that s/sheet, read each job and create a URL which emulates the job entry page on the hoster's site (eg: www.[jobsite].com\newjob\addjob.jsp?title=Engineer&location=london&startdate=01-Jun-06... etc etc). The hosting site uses JSP so I can't do anything much from .Net except create a URL to submit each job... but at least we do know we can emulate the URL to submit a new job. So my task is really to somehow receive the s/sheet, build each URL and submit it. So my question is, given these requirements, how should I go about it? I was thinking of a web service which the clients placing jobs can call from their own browser but I don't know if a web service could read a s/sheet (I assume not). Failing that, I guess we could have an interim web page on a web server somewhere that allows the clients to upload and process the s/sheet. Other ways I thought of was allowing them to email the s/sheet as an Outlook attachment to an email address which would be monitored by a .Net service which would then do the reading and URL creation/submission. I guess what I'm trying to write here is almost middleware (I like to call it "squeezeware" as we're squeezing it in where nothing should really be!) so any ideas or comments on what I've suggested so far would be much appreciated. I'm not looking for anyone to do this for me - just after some fresh ideas! TIA for any help/suggestions... Mike -- modified at 20:55 Thursday 20th April, 2006
The other thing I should have mentioned is that I can use .Net 2.0 if I want (my client leaves that sort of thing up to me) so anything that v2.0 can offer me to get this done better/quicker I'd be happy to hear about (I haven't used v2.0 very much at all yet). Mike
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The other thing I should have mentioned is that I can use .Net 2.0 if I want (my client leaves that sort of thing up to me) so anything that v2.0 can offer me to get this done better/quicker I'd be happy to hear about (I haven't used v2.0 very much at all yet). Mike
An interim web page with upload would seem to make sense to me if someone will be manually uploading the spreadsheet - then you can display error messages etc. I don't really see the speed gains though if they still have to enter all the job data into the spreadsheet first... If they have a DB that's going to write out the SS data, then they might be better getting the DB to spit out xml and pass that to a webservice of yours (bit more simple on your part...).
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An interim web page with upload would seem to make sense to me if someone will be manually uploading the spreadsheet - then you can display error messages etc. I don't really see the speed gains though if they still have to enter all the job data into the spreadsheet first... If they have a DB that's going to write out the SS data, then they might be better getting the DB to spit out xml and pass that to a webservice of yours (bit more simple on your part...).
You're right of course - the problem here is that the clients have to enter the jobs *somewhere* and if they've already entered it in their own systems then they don't want to have to do it again for us. Anyway, after another conversation with my client we have agreed that we will forget the Excel thing (way too perilous) and request the users to supply us with an XML or CSV document - that way they can use the data already existing in their system(s) and we will (hopefully) get a properly structured "job" object which the web service or web page can parse and then create the URL to post to the hosted job site. Mike