ASPAlliance.com : The #1 Active Server Pages .NET Community The #1 ASP.NET Community
Search   Search

Subscribe   Subscribe

Powered by ORCSWeb Hosting


Site Stats


Powered By ASP.NET
 
Featured Sponsor

Featured Columnist


Featured Book
Professional ASP.NET Web Services
Professional ASP.NET Web Services

Find Prices
Sample Chapter


New! asp.netPRO

We publish our articles in the standard RSS format.

Powerful .NET Email Component

Code Sharing Software

How to Create a text file in ASP .NET?

Written on: May, 13th 2002.
Introduction

One of the frequent task in any web application is dealing with the text files. In classic ASP, we used the FileSystemObject to deal with files. In this article, we will see how to create text files in ASP .NET.

Things that we will be learning in this article
  1. The namespace that is required to deal with Files
  2. The StreamWriter Object
  3. Creating a Text File
  4. How to capture errors which may occur while creating a text file?

The Namespace that is required to deal with Files

We require the namespace, System.IO to work with files. So, we should import this namespace in our ASPX page such as

<%@ Import Namespace="System.IO" %>

How to Create a text File?

To start with, we need to create an instance of the object, StreamWriter. The instance will be the file pointer for us. Once we have a File Pointer, we need to invoke the method, CreateText method of the object, File. The method, CreateText takes a string as an argument. The string is nothing but the path of file that is going to get created. Now, let us see an example. Let us assume, we have a textbox with textmode set to MultiLine and a button. On the click event of the button, we need to create a text file. The code within the Click event is shown below.

Code in the OnClick event of button.
    Sub WriteToFile(sender As Object, e As EventArgs)

        Dim fp As StreamWriter

        Try
            fp = File.CreateText(Server.MapPath(".\Upload\") & "test.txt")
            fp.WriteLine(txtMyFile.Text)
            lblStatus.Text = "File Succesfully created!"
            fp.Close()
        Catch err As Exception
            lblStatus.Text = "File Creation failed. Reason is as follows

" & err.ToString()
        Finally

        End Try

    End Sub

How it works?

We are first creating an instance of StreamWriter, which is termed as fp (file pointer). Then, in the Try block, we invoke the CreateText method. To write the content, we use the method, WriteLine. Actually, we have just three lines of code which writes data to a text file. Once we have successfully written to the text file, we close the StreamWriter by invoking the Close method of StreamWriter.

Sample output of our scenario

Creating Text Files in ASP .NET - 15,605  bytes
Fig: Creating Text Files in ASP .NET

Test this Script

Download the code

Click here to download the ASPX page

Conclusion

Creating a text file is very easy. We can easily create a text file in just 3 lines of code. To read content from a text file, visit my article Read data from Text File

Links

Textbox Web Server Control
Reading data from a Text File

Send your comments to das@aspalliance.com        Back to Tutorial

 Copyright © 2000-2003 ASPAlliance.com  Page Rendered at 11/21/2009 2:01:24 PM