Content Management with the FSO

By now, you should have a good taste of the FSO and its methods and properties. Let's dig a little deeper and do some engineering design to tackle a more difficult problem.

Content management is being able to keep track of, manipulate, and generally perform tasks with content, typically documents in a web environment. Smart content management does all that in an easy, painless fashion. (Check out this article to study up on content management.) Behind the scenes of such an application is heavy duty file manipulation. Once again, enter the FSO. We need to be able to move, delete, rename, and create files, and our friend the FSO steps in nicely. In the article above, we discuss a submission system for writers to publish their content. What we don't mention is exactly what to do with the file once it's up.

First of all, you'll most likely want to rename the file, since the writer probably named it something only he would understand or care about. To be able to keep track of all your documents, you'll want to rename it to something unique, that is easily identifiable by your system. Unfortunately, the FSO doesn't allow for an easy file renaming, so we'll have to engineer a bit.

<%

' create the fso object

set fso = Server.Createobject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

path = "c:\temp\test.txt"

strDate = Replace(Date(), "/", "")

strDir = "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\articles\" & strDate

strNewFileName = Hour(Now) & "_" & Minute(Now) & "_" & second(Now) & ".html"



' open the old file

set file = fso.opentextfile(path, 1)  <-- For reading

strText = file.readall

set file = nothing



' check for and/or create folder

if not fso.folderexists(Server.MapPath(strDir)) then

	set f = fso.CreateFolder(Server.MapPath(strDir))

else

	set f = fso.GetFolder(Server.MapPath(strDir))

end if



' create and write new file

set file = fso.Createtextfile(f.path & "\" & strNewFileName)

file.write(strText)

set f = nothing

file.close

set file = nothing



' delete the old file

fso.DeleteFile(path & "\" & rst("FileName") & i)



' clean up

set fso = nothing

%>

The lack of the FSO's abilities however can be used to our advantage here; we can perform two steps in one. First, we open and read the file's contents. I'll assume that we'll want to create a unique folder, as well as a unique filename to store the article in. However, since this folder's path will change every day, we'll have to first check to see if the folder already exists, and if it doesn't, create it. This is done by the if not fso.folderexists section. We then get that path and use it to create the new file (you'll recall that the FSO needs the full path name to manipulate files, and the GetFolder and CreateFolder methods return just that - a full path). After we're done with the new file, we'll want to get rid of the old one, so it doesn't clutter up our file system. This is accomplished with fso.DeleteFile.

So the two steps we accomplished here were renaming the file, and moving it to a more apropos directory. Note that we could also have done some more manipulation here, such as editing the text before we wrote it to the new file.

Searching with the FSO
The wonders of the File System Object
What you can't do