How to generate HTML pages

Question

Hi all I'm about to embark on a new personal project and can't decide quite how to do it. In summary I have a database whose data I want to use to create html pages for a website. The website will just be a series of static hmtl pages. I will keep all the data locally and would generate the required pages and upload them whenever I needed to. I do not want to have the database anywhere but on my lcoal machine. My questions are: 1. Should I create a windows or web application to generate my pages? 2. If a window app will this be faster? 3. If an web app how do I automatically save the result of an aspx page as static html? 4. What would you recommend as the best way to generate these pages - HTMLTextWriter? 5. Should I perhaps generate XML and use XSL to render the pages? 6. What classes are available 9and best) for the generation of html pages? Which direction would you all head in? Thanks for any advice or ideas. Nick

davec_3000 · Answer

I suggest a Windows app. It will not necessarily be faster but is just a better choice for this sort of thing. Generating XML and using XSL is certainly an option but you'd need to be sure your target browsers will support it. Below is a snippet that could potentially be used to do this. You could have a table or XML config file of all of the URLs that you wanted to get and save as HTML and then loop through them. It needs to be made more robust but may be a good starting point. Cheers Dave ------------------------------------------------ // Initialize the WebRequest. WebRequest myRequest = WebRequest.Create(http://localhost/test/test2.aspx); // Return the response. WebResponse myResponse = myRequest.GetResponse(); // Get response stream (the HTML of the requested page) Stream responseStream = myResponse.GetResponseStream(); // Set encoding Encoding encode = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(utf-8); // Pipe the stream to a higher level stream reader with the required encoding format. StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(responseStream encode); string htmlResult = readStream.ReadToEnd(); string savePath = @C:	emp + myRequest.RequestUri.AbsolutePath; DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(Path.GetDirectoryName(savePath)); if (!di.Exists) { di.Create(); } FileStream fs = new FileStream(savePath FileMode.Create); StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(fs Encoding.UTF8); sw.Write(htmlResult); sw.Flush(); myResponse.Close(); fs.Close();

robin 0 · Answer

offtopic: If I were you - I'd use Perl and not C#... For generating a lot of pages from database data - I always use Perl scripts... 1. they are always cross-platform 2. they are usually faster and need less resources...

jshepler · Answer

In global.ascx there's an event you can use - OnRequestEnd - that fires right before the response is sent to the client (HTML). You should be able to take the Response object and dump off a copy of the stream to your database. If it doesn't work from global.ascx as expected check into using an HttpModule to setup a filter that fires on the same event but it would be handled by a .dll that you would write.

nickc · Answer

Thanks for the suggestion. My only problem with that is that I will be generating about 3000 pages so you can imagine how long it would take to do each one individually. I really need something that is a bit more automated that means I can leave my PC creating and saving the pages while I do something else. Nick

itaym02 · Answer

I would use WebForm to generate the pages at my home. Then I will put my mouse on the generated page press right button choose show source code Copy All the pagepaste it in an empty text file save the text file as name.html. (Open the saved HTML to see it is rendered OK). If you don't know how to remove all the tags Then do it in the old ASP (Or PHP).