How to Use ASP.NET MVC to get “content=source code” from another web page once a day?

Question

I would like to set timer for getting page source from some page and compare it if some changes happens with a version of yesterday. which logic should i use to call some page once a day? my program is just a webpage and it cant send requests every 24 hours. how can i achieve to send request and check if changes happens?

Answer 1

you don't want to use a Web Application to do this, since a Web application typically responds to requests and doesn't wake up and make requests of its own (which is what you need).

What you need is a regular .NET application. It could be a console application that makes the call out to this other website. you could use the WebClient class or similar to do the job.

Once you have it all working, you can use Windows Scheduler to schedule the task at whatever interval you need.

If you need to then communicate with you Web Application from the console app, you can do the same thing, that is make a request to a specific page or handler from you console app (just like you called a page on the other website). When you web application receives the request, you can act on this and do what you need to.

Keep in mind that if all you need to do is update some database tables, you might as well do that from the console application.

Think of your console app (that uses WebClient) as a custom browser. You can call any url you need to and the Web application on the other end sees that call as if it were made by a browser. So using you specialized "browser" you can call other web sites as well as your own.