VIewState issue in creating a Word Doc from Rendered ASPX

Early last week, i was involved in a pretty interesting assignment of creating a word document with some dynamically created data on the click of a button from an ASPX Page. I created a template aspx page for the word Document. In the load of the page, i took all the values from session and loaded the labels. Did a Server.Execute("Page.aspx", StringWriter) from the button click event. the StringWriter object was converted to a byte array and written in to the HTTP Stream using Response.BinaryWrite(byte[]). Everything went well and the word document was opened . But there was an uninvited guest in the word document when i opened it. it was a text box on top of the word doc with some junk values in it. After some investigations, I understood that it was the Viewstate variable created as an inside the rendedred HTML. I turned off viewstate by doing Page.EnableViewState = False. And tested again... but now also the text box appeared in the word document , but with no values in it. Even if you turn off ViewState, the viewstate variable will be created in the rendered HTML with no values in it. Workarounds:Now, there are 2 workarounds for this issue.(As suggested by 2 Avanade comunity members) 1. Use a usercontrol with the doc template created in it. Load values in the load event of the control. On Pag Load event, render the usercontrol using UserControl.RenderControl();This worked out perfectly.
2. Either use Server.Execute("Page.aspx", StringWriter) from another page or this.Render(HTMLTextWriter) from the current page and get the rendered HTML of the Word Doc page in a StringWriter, Convert it to a string and find out Viewstate declaration inside the string and remove it. We choose this method as we had some problem in creating usercontrol in the complex architecture.
I wrote the following method to remove ViewState from the rendered HTML:

//Method to remove __VIEWSTATE and stateTarget variables
private string RemoveInputFieldsFromRenderedHTML(string pageData)
{//pageDate variable contails the rendered HTML from the stringwriter.
int startIndex;
int endIndex;
//Variable to store the length of closing tag of Viewstate

string newPageData = "";
string viewStateStartTag = "string viewStateEndTag = "\" />";int lengthOfClosingTag = 4; //This can be re written as viewStateEndTag.Length()
startIndex = pageData.IndexOf(viewStateStartTag);
endIndex = pageData.IndexOf(viewStateEndTag,startIndex);
if(startIndex > 0)
newPageData = pageData.Remove( startIndex,(endIndex + lengthOfClosingTag) - startIndex);

return newPageData;
}

Hope this piece of code will be useful to somebody someday....

I was hosting an intranet website in Windows server 2003 with IIS6 . I noticed that the server was taking too much time to respond when the site was accessed . Then in the task manager I saw w3wp.exe(worker process for ASP.NET) was taking more than 500MB of memory.As a result the OS was using too much virtual memory .(Hard disk busy light was always on ). I went to microsoft website and saw that there is a hotfix for this problem and after applying this hotfix , a registry tweak must be done . But I couldnt find the hotfix patch to download.

I restarted the machine and everything was working fine. Then i wrote a scrip to restart the server every sunday night. It was the only solution feasible at that point of time.

I wrote a post regarding this issue in www.dotnetjunkies.com and today i got a gud reply for it. The reply is as follows.


Re: w3wp.exe taking too much memoryPosted: 02-23-2007 11:46 PM
That w3wp.exe also has been creating havoc on our servers us so we wrote a simple application to control it. Details and download here:
http://www.linkhelpers.net/w3wp_fix.asp Works for us.

Details in the link is given below:

w3wp.exe FixSomehow, somewhere, someone released some untested code and hundreds of servers are crippled. I scanned through the forums an all the fixes were red herrings. So I decided to look into it myself. Looping like a loon it just eats up CPU resources like a voracious pig. The solution I came up with was to set w3wp.exe's priority to Idle. This seemed to help but the application would eventually crash and restart with the priority defaulting to Normal. Well baby sitting an executable is not realistic.
HeartBeatHeartBeat.exe is a stand alone application that will pulse every couple of seconds and reset w3wp.exe's priority to Idle. This appears to lessen the impact but is not a permanent fix. This fix has not been tested with servers running ISAPI filters which w3wp.exe is supposed to address. There are no guarantees or do we accept any liability for the use of this fix.
Access DatabasesFor some reason I still have not figured out, an *.ldb file causes IIS worker error dialogs. Once this file is deleted, the error dialogs stop. Randy Delos Reyes was instrumental in figuring most of this out.
Download HeartBeat
http://www.linkhelpers.net/public/HeartBeat.zipRemember, test this fix first before using it. We are not liable for any unforseen problems you may have. I do know that it works great for our servers.

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Try your luck . :) .

Aspnet_Regiis.exe

After doing a fresh installation of Visual Studio.NET in myWindow XP machine I was trying to open a sample application in ASP.NET.But VS was giving an error.

"The specified server is not running .NET 1.1"

And the solution :

go to C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322 and execute aspnet_regiis -i I got .NET 1.1 installed.. Now everything is working fine.

The generalized path for aspnet_regiis is :

[Drive] :\[Windowsfolder]\Microsoft.NET\Framework\[Version]

Now what is this utility for ?

simply aspnet_regiis.exe is "ASP.NET IIS Registration Tool "

There may be different versions of .NET installed in a machine and the ASP.NET ISAPI version mapped to an ASP.NET application determines which version of the common language runtime is used for the application.An ASP.NET application is associated with an ASP.NET ISAPI version through a script map in IIS.Aspnet_regiis.exe allows the admin easily update the script maps for an ASP.NET application to point to the ASP.NET ISAPI version associated with the tool.

The tool is also used for

1.To display all installed versions of .NET
2.Register .NET versions coupled with the tool
3.Create client script directories
4.Perform other configurations.

Usage: aspnet_regiis.exe [-i[r] [-enable] -u[a] -r -s[n] -k[n]> -lv -lk -c -e[a] -?]
-i - Install this version of ASP.NET and update scriptmaps at the IIS metabase root and for all scriptmaps below the root. Existing scriptmaps of lower version are upgraded to this version.
-ir - Install this version of ASP.NET, register only. Do not update scriptmaps in IIS.
-enable - When -enable is specified with -i or -ir, ASP.NET will also be enabled in the IIS security console (IIS 6.0 or later).
-s - Install scriptmaps for this version at the specified path, recursively. Existing scriptmaps of lower version are upgraded to this version.
E.g. aspnet_regiis.exe -s W3SVC/1/ROOT/SampleApp1
-sn - Install scriptmaps for this version at the specified path, non-recursively. Existing scriptmaps of lower version are upgraded to this version.
-r - Install scriptmaps for this version at the IIS metabase root and for all scriptmaps below the root. All existing scriptmaps are changed to this version, regardless of current version.
-u - Uninstall this version of ASP.NET. Existing scriptmaps to this version are remapped to highest remaining version of ASP.NET installed on the machine.
-ua - Uninstall all versions of ASP.NET on the machine
-k - Remove all scriptmaps to any version of ASP.NET from the specified path, recursively. E.g. aspnet_regiis.exe -k W3SVC/1/ROOT/SampleApp1
-kn - Remove all scriptmaps to any version ASP.NET from the specified path, non-recursively.
-lv - List all versions of ASP.NET that are installed on the machine, with status and installation path. Status: Valid[ (Root)]Invalid
-lk - List all the path of all IIS metabase keys where ASP.NET is scriptmapped, together with the version. Keys that inherit ASP.NET scriptmaps from a parent key will not be displayed.
-c - Install the client side scripts for this version to the aspnet_client subdirectory of each IIS site directory.
-e - Remove the client side scripts for this version from the aspnet_client subdirectory of each IIS site directory.
-ea - Remove the client side scripts for all versions from the aspnet_client subdirectory of each IIS site directory.
-? - Print this help text.

A unique version of Aspnet_regiis.exe is included with each version of the .NET Framework. Since each version of the tool is applicable only to its associated version of the .NET Framework, be sure to use the appropriate version of the tool to configure an ASP.NET application.