Getting the list of newsletters

The function works by walking through the files and folders on the server, passing what it finds into the functions that are passed into WalkFolders as parameters. Easily extensible as they say.

// create array to hold dates of newsletter var sDates = new Array; var nTotal; [code snipped for brevity] // create handle to FileSystemObject var oFSO = Server.CreateObject ( 'Scripting.FileSystemObject' ); // search the archive folder var oFolder = oFSO.GetFolder ( Server.MapPath ( 'Newsletters' ) ); // start walking through the files and sub-folders WalkFolders ( oFolder, 0, DisplayArchiveFolder, DisplayArchiveName );

I first declare two global variables to store the list of newsletters found, and the total number of them. Then I create an instance of the FileSystemObject, and get a Folder object relating to the Newsletters sub-folder.

Note: Server.MapPath is used to translate a relative path to an absolute path on the server

Then WalkFolders is called, passing in the Folder object and the two functions that I will use to collect the file and folders that are found. Those functions are shown below:

// ============================================ // don't need to display archive folder // ============================================ function DisplayArchiveFolder ( oFolder, nLevel ) { } // ============================================ // display file name with link to display page // ============================================ function DisplayArchiveName ( oFile, nLevel ) {    var sName = oFile.Name;    // skip test files (start with _), and non-text files    if ( sName.charAt ( 0 ) == '_' || -1 == sName.indexOf ( '.txt' ) )       return;    // remove extension    sName = sName.slice ( 0, sName.indexOf ( '.' ) );    // add date to array, for sorting later    sDates [ nTotal++ ] = sName;    // NOTE: in JScript 5.5 use sDates.push ( sName ) }

I don't care about any folders that might be found, so I just supply an empty function for sending folder information.

DisplayArchiveName gets passed a File object. First, as always, I ignore any files that start with '_' just in case I want to ever have any private files in the folder. I also ignore any files that don't have a 'txt' extension.

Next, I remove the file extension with slice, and add the filename to the sDates array, incrementing nTotal at the same time.

Note: As commented in the code above, you could dispense with nTotal altogether, and simply use sDates.push to add a new element to the array. Unfortunately, that's only available in JScript 5.5, which my server doesn't have yet. My development machine does, but the real one doesn't. Go figure!

Now to throw the first "spanner in the works" as we English people say. For obvious reasons, I don't want to do this every time someone goes to view my archives. The answer is of course Application variables...

Part 3: Caching the archive names...