Top banner change dynamically...

[missshaikh]

hi friends

I am programming a website which will include ad banners. The requirements are that the banners will be dynamically changing for each page. By this I mean that if there are ten banners in total and each page will always have two banners. So that two of the ten banners will be randomly selected and placed in the webpage. I have this part figured out. the problem I am facing is that they want to have the ability that banner will randomly apper which fatch frmo DB.

To wrap this up I need some ideas of how to make this work the best way possible. Who The ads are changing dynamically...

I am not look for code on this just ideas of how this should work

Thank you

[Plater]

These ads are all regular image files right? I'll tell you what I would do.
I would make a page called say "RandomAd.aspx" . The duty of that page is to randomly select a banner add to display. You can make the page act as a "serve-up" page. So when it picks the add to show, it does something like the following:

Response.Clear();
Response.Cache.SetRevalidation(HttpCacheRevalidation.AllCaches);
Response.ContentType = "image/jpeg";//change to match the image
Response.WriteFile(FileAndPath);
Response.End();
 

Then make your images on your page point to that aspx page. They will randomly everytime.

AND you can use javascript to call refresh to your images, which will call that aspx page, which will produce a new image. you can use the timer functions in javascript to achieve this if need be.

[Curtis Rutland]

Using Plater's idea...
You could also use a System.IO.Direc toryInfo object to poll the directory that contains all (and only) your ad images. Then write a method to randomly select one to use.

The benefit of this method is that you can change the files in the directory without having to change your code. If you get new ads, you don't have to change your page.

Or, you could store your images as BLOBs in a database, and select them out to display them. That would work well too.