I would like to create a fairly simple ASP.Net application that takes an XML record from an HTTP post request, submits it to a process that invokes a command line app that parses the XML file, takes the parsed XML file (as XML), and returns the result.
For now the process can be synchronous as the transform has to complete and there are no parallel activities that need to be performed.
I'm not sure that writing an HTTP Handler is the way to go, but maybe I'm mistaken. Plus there are no examples of doing that in Visual Studio 2013 using IIS 8.0 or 8.5 and I don't really understand the value of applying a file extension or processing
an HTTP post to initiate the request, perhaps using a dedicated port. I already have a class library for handling the process request.
I'm also a little confused about reading the post request - it seems I can just do it during the page load and that I should be able to extract the first request form field - that of course means using a webform to process the request which seems to be the
most straight-forward way to do this. So I'm looking for the best practice for fielding this kind of request. My target server is Windows 2012, but I'm developing with VS 2013 and C# on Windows 7 using IIS Express and configuring IIS is confusing.
Overall it is a fairly simple app, but there are so many rich new features in VS 2013 (most of my work has been in VS 2005). I also want to build a test app and am looking for the best way to do so, although I think I can build a simple client app
to do that. The business requirements will be to issue the post request from a MarkLogic xquery request which will take care of any JSON wrappers and balance between multiple Windows servers to handle the load.
Thanks for any help with this!
~Tim
