Calling an ASP page at set times of day

Is there any way to do this?

[IanTurner]

I need to set up a regular email to my supplier giving order details for a perticular day.

Is there anyway I can do this using an ASP page called at a set time of day?

[amoore]

If you're on a linux/unix machine, you can use cron. It's a tool that will run commands a set time of day. "man crontab", "man 5 crontab", and "man cron" should give you a lot of information about this command. There's also a boatload of online resources about standard unix tools like this.

If I need to pull web pages from cron, I usually use wget or curl, which are command line tools to pull web pages.

Any competent scripter should be able to put together a shell or perl script to pull a web page and show you how to set up a cron job to call it.

[IanTurner]

Unfortunately its on an IIS server

[ralnikov]

Better way to do that task is to write WSH script instead of ASP (these scripts are almost the same) and add it to Scheduled tasks. Or get a command-line HTTP downloader (e.g. wget win32 port) and add to scheduled task something near 'wget [192.168.0.1...]

[Xoc]

You can use the windows scheduler, as ralnakov said. Another hack that could be used if you have a steady stream of visitors and the timing of the report can be less precise:

On a very popular page (or all pages with a SSI), do a check to see if enough time has passed since the last report was sent. If so, then send the report. I wrote about using the CDONTS library to send mail in this [webmasterworld.com] post.

[IanTurner]

Xoc, the CDONTS route was the line I was currently taking it was triggering the page that is causing me the problems - in the initial stages the site may not be hit during a day and getting the trigger page to work each day is my worry.

The client will want to see a mail even if they have no orders to process.

Once the site was getting regular hits I can see the method you are proposing working very effectively.

[Xoc]

In that case the Windows Scheduler would be the way to go. If you don't have control over the server, then any machine that is on continuously and has a continuous connection to the internet could issue the request to the page using the technique mentioned in ralnikov's post. This forces a hit on a given page at a particular time.

[ralnikov]

Xoc, please try to be more accurate. I'm ralnikov, not ralnakov. It's my last name. Thank you.

[Xoc]

My apologies. I got it right the second time!

[ralnikov]

OK, thank you Xoc :)