Question:
Is there any way to fire a file deletion from inside an ASP page while the page is being unloaded? I am creating a file on the fly using a control that I wrote that is used by an object on an ASP page. I would like to leave the file clean up until the user is finished with the page, but I can’t figure out a way to do this gracefully.
Answer:
The Visual InterDev Page Object Design-Time-Control (DTC) can help. Using the Page Object control, you can make a page behave as an object that can be referenced from client-side or server-side script. The script procedures that are defined in the page become the methods that can be called.
Suppose you have three pages:
Page 1 – A new ASP page.
Page 2 – The page that signals the file deletion when unloaded.
Page 3 – The file to delete.
In your case, you would want to create a new ASP page with a procedure in that page that uses the FileSystemObject. You can use it to locate and delete the file you want to remove (Page 1). Next, you would add a Page Object DTC to that page (Page 1). Properties of the Page Object DTC enable you to expose procedures of that page to the scripts of other pages. Then, you would add a Page Object DTC to the page from which you want to signal the file deletion. When this page is unloaded, the cleanup should occur (Page 2). Next, you would add code to the window_onunload client-side event procedure of that page (Page 2). That code would use the Page Object to call the procedure in Page 1 that uses the FileSystemObject.
