Automation of a Admin process

[rossy3]

I am new to this forum and have bee programming on/off in C# for a little while so bare with me! We have a internal site used by our team that processes transactions created by our end users. We process these transactions 5 times a day which is call our cycle run. Our team processes these transactions through our Admin screen which is a series of events/buttons that they click in in order to process the transactions at a given step, produce a text file that is sent to the server and then our mainframe process picks up the text file and processes that file. Once the mainframe job gets done, it sends back a file with the results and our admin users click on the next button to receive the text file. Depending on the results, the transaction could be set to an error or moved on to the next step in the process. This can continue on until the final step is reached. That is the process at a high-level (which I know there is more info needed but this is to get the conversation started).

I would like to know how to get started to make this an automated process so that our admin personal don't have to click on the buttons anymore and it continuously moves through the steps (a cycle) every hour but need the click events to be processed so that the code is still executed. I need this to run in the background even if the site is not open or displayed.

This site has been coded in C# with .Net Framework 4.5

Please ask any questions and ANY help or discussion is greatly appreciated!

 

[jmcilhinney]

...bare with me!

I assume that you mean "bear with you" because, if you're taking your clothes off, you're doing it alone.

As for your question, you talk about a "site" so it sounds like you mean a web site, but if you're talking about automating the process then it would not have anything to do with a web site. The whole point of a web site is for a user to interact with a system through a browser but it's that interaction that you're trying to avoid.

In order to have the process initiated at regular intervals, there are probably two main options. You could create a Windows service and use a Timer or you could create a Console application and use the Windows task scheduler to execute it. From what you've described, I'd tend to go with the first option. That's because a Windows service is always running, so you can also use a FileSystemWatcher to detect the files created by the external system and automatically continue with the later steps of the process.

 

[rossy3]

Thanks! Darn "a" and "e" mix up on that word! :smug:

Do you have any specific code examples I can use/look at for the Windows service, timer process and FileSystemWatch?

 

[jmcilhinney]

I don't have any specific examples, no.