web app to console app?

开发者_StackOverflowI'm working with this small web application (1 page) built by someone else that does a specific task after pressing a button on the web page.

Now the requirements have changed slightly, and we need to automate this to run weekly without the need of user interaction.

What would be the best way of doing this, minimizing the changes done to the code?

I was thinking on adding a console app to the project that then references internally the web app but that doesnt seem to work.

Or maybe converting the web app to a to console app, if that is actualy possible?

Is there any straightforward way of doing this?

Thanks

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First, make sure the "specific task" is broken out from the Web application so it resides in its own .NET project. Even if this project just contains one class you're "separating concerns" between the Web-based UI and the task itself.

Then you can create another "wrapper project" to call this new project as you wish. A console application might well do the job -- you can run that using a Scheduled Task -- or you may prefer to use a Windows service.

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It really depends on how well the existing code is structured. A common approach is to divide business logic from the presentation layer. In VS, it's normally done by creating a class library project and keeping all the business logic in there. A web application project would then just instantiate business logic classes and run their methods.

If it is done like that, you just need to reference the class library project. If, on the other hand, you have all the logic in the web application project, probably there's no fast way of doing that, as you're not supposed to instantiate Page classes manually (well, you can do that as well, but that is clumsy and not recommended). So in that case, you should create a class library project and move there all the logic you need to use in your console app. I would imagine that would require quite a bit of refactoring.