Passing information from website to exe ?

damnyanks

Howdy,

Doing a website at the moment. I'd like for an application I made to use the data passed from the website. Was curious if anyone knows how difficult this is to do with .Net on IIS ?

both things (application and website) have been written in .Net. do I turn the exe into a dll or something so it cna use it ?

aidan_walsh

What're you looking to pass to the application? Pages? Files? Serialized Objects?

caff

have both the web ap and your binary (exe) app both refernce the same database to store the info..

what you use as a db is up to you, sql/flatfile whatever,

one thing to keep in mind is that the exe and the web app might both fereence the data at the same time so make sure whichever db method you chose wont keel over with contention issues

damnyanks

Sorry was horribly vague

There is no database involved, but will have xml files. So I want to use it as a repository. The website should be able to display the files in a list.

So what I think I should do is -

I sent the XML file to the web site. Web site stores it on the computer, the exe works on the xml file. I guess thats it. Use the website to do the formatting list bit.

The Corinthian

Where is the Web site and where is the exe? Same server? Different servers? The former on a server the latter on a user workstation? Is the Web site pushing data to the exe or the other way around or is data being pulled?

What you've posted is far too vague and, in places, contradictory.

masterK

I presume that because you're using IIS that you're going with ASP.net and/or c#/vb.net.

If this is the case the website should really just capture the data and pass it to backend DLL in c# or vb.net. Don't know what you'd even consider having an .exe for.

Do you want to display the contents of the XML as raw XML on the page or will they be formatted into some sort of user friendly format. If you're transforming the XML then that should be done in the DLL and just the output passed to the web app. Also have a look at XSD.exe for to help with the XML parsing.

stevenmu

The obvious thing to do is to run a web service on the web site, the windowsforms exe can then reference the web service and they can send data back and forth easily. There's loads of tutorials available for creating a web service in your .net language of choice and referencing it from a windowsforms app. In short, your webservice would just consist of standard .net procedures and functions to read whatever data you want out of your xml files and return it in whatever form you want (maybe a dataset or datatable ?). Your windows forms app, once it has a reference to the web service can then just call these functions as if they were local to it and get the data. It's a very simple effective solution to implement.

Ginger

Webservices are your only man... Dont even think of doing it any other way especially when its just XML.

If you need to move your webservice around, just make sure that the URLBehaviour of the generated proxy class to be dynamic and change your web.config to point to the new service