shelling an app on server from asp?

[Rich]

Hello,

I would like to turn on/invoke a VB6 app which resides on
the server/folder where IIS is running from an ASP page.
As for security, this would be all happening within an
intranet with firewall protection, etc, no outside
internet access. In pseudocode of my asp app I am
thinking like this:

<%
....
RetVal = Shell("../myApp.exe " & someArg, vbNormalFocus)
....
%>

I would like to be able to invoke myApp from anywhere
within my company. Is it doable what I would like to do?
And if so, if my pseudo code above is not going to work,
may I request if someone could share the correct method?

Thanks,
Rich

[Bob Barrows]

Rich wrote:

(you asked for it :) I have to pull data from a Lotus
Notes Domino Server (actually 4 of them). The datasets I
am pulling contain like 200 fields a piece and like
300,000+ records apiece. The fields can contain any
manner of data, and more times than not people have
entered characters that are not ascii based or recognized,
etc. So I have a VB app which pulls this data and cleans
up unacceptable characters, and writes nice clean ascii
text to my sql server tables and in sql I have sp's that
converts dates back to date format, etc. Maybe DTS could
do all this too, and I'm sure I should purchase a book on
DTS, but I haven't. Truth is, I just don't see how DTS
could pull data from a Lotus Notes DB since Notes is
document based (as opposed to relational).

Given the proper ODBC driver oo OLEDB Provider, DTS can certainly do this.

Bob Barrows

--
Microsoft MVP -- ASP/ASP.NET
Please reply to the newsgroup. The email account listed in my From
header is my spam trap, so I don't check it very often. You will get a
quicker response by posting to the newsgroup.

[Bob Barrows]

Rich wrote:

Surely there is a way to do this with ASP, ...

I don't know. I am very much opposed to doing time-consuming tasks (such as
data exports/imports) via ASP, so muxh so that I've never really
investigated ways of doing them. This is not something I would recommend
doing in a client-server environment.
You could create a VB application, and use SQL Agent to run it periodically,
passing parameters to it via the command line ...

Bob Barrows

--
Microsoft MVP -- ASP/ASP.NET
Please reply to the newsgroup. The email account listed in my From
header is my spam trap, so I don't check it very often. You will get a
quicker response by posting to the newsgroup.

[Rich]

Thank you for this idea. Oh, and I didn't mean to do data
import/export via ASP. I meant pass params via ASP. But
the command line idea sounds interesting. Unfortunately
for me, I came into the programming scene after gui had
taken over and am not well versed with command line
stuff. Is it possible to send params from another
workstation to the server via the command line? What
would it look like?

C:\cd \\server1\f:\di r1 or C:\\cd U:\dir1
U:\dir1\myApp.e xe arg1, arg2

Even though my app lives on the server, by calling it from
a workstation, wouldn't that invoke the app on the calling
workstation? So data would go from Domino server to
workstation to the server where Sql Server resides.
Hopefully, I will figure out the best way to do what I am
doing with the least amount of installing apps on
workstations, or having apps on the server which poll
24/7. I just thought ASP might be an option. Command
Line, hmmm, interesting.

Rich

You could create a VB application, and use SQL Agent to run it periodically,passing parameters to it via the command line ...

Bob Barrows