The code below is my current solution to creating a Tracked adRotator, I
hope you can agree that (along with two web.config lines) it is a very
compact solution. I have not included the XML Utility function as it
comes from a seperate library. It is this function that I think needs to
be modified?

Currently it loads the AdvertismentFile into a "XmlDocument" selects the
 First node with the matching "ImageUrl" Attribute, Increments the
"DisplayCount" or "ClickCount" atribute (as Appropriate). and then saves
the document back to the file system.

There are two situations when this function fails. An Inability to load
the file because it is locked by another process and the same when saving.

Do I just have a loop with a try catch and loop until I can gain access
or time out?

Regards

MC

------------------ TrackedAdRotator.cs ------------------

using System;
using System.Web;

namespace mrc.AdRotator
{
    public class TrackedAdRotator : System.Web.UI.WebControls.AdRotator
    {
        protected override void
OnAdCreated(System.Web.UI.WebControls.AdCreatedEventArgs e)
        {
            Utils.IncrementAdvertNumericAttribute(e.ImageUrl,
"ImageUrl", "DisplayCount", Page.Server.MapPath(AdvertisementFile));
            if (e.NavigateUrl != "")
            {
                e.NavigateUrl =
string.Format("~/Adverts/AdvertHandler.ashx?Url={0}&AdvertismentFile={1}",
Page.Server.UrlEncode(e.NavigateUrl),
Page.Server.UrlEncode(AdvertisementFile));
            }
            base.OnAdCreated(e);
        }
    }

    public class Redirector : IHttpHandler
    {
        public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
        {

Utils.IncrementAdvertNumericAttribute(context.Request["Url"],
"NavigateUrl", "ClickCount",
context.Server.MapPath(context.Request["AdvertismentFile"]));
            context.Response.Redirect(context.Request["Url"]);
        }

        public bool IsReusable
        {
            get
            {
                return false;
            }
        }
    }
}

Hi MC,

Even if we could update the xml file "database", there's a high chance that
we will encounter locking issues since multiple requests can take place at
the same time and they all need to write to the xml file. Note IO
operations are slow, therefore such locking and IO errors will occur very
frequently.

On the other hand, database is much better handling such concurrent
operations, especially if you're inserting two irrelevant new records
(instead of updating a single record); and database operations are much
faster than IO operations.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Walter Wang (wawang@online.microsoft.com, remove 'online.')
Microsoft Online Community Support

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