Hello all...

I've written here over the past week about problems running apps from an aspx page. I've yet to get a concrete response on how to fix my problem, so I just want to detail the design of this intranet page so that maybe someone can help me get this working.

In my company's intranet, we have a section for web tools, which actually just makes mundane tasks more convenient through the use of ASP.NET. We have some Perl scripts that were written for Combustion to convert files from one framerate to another. It works in linux environments since perl is native there, but our entire studio is Win 2K. So, my idea was to write an ASPX page where users supply the input file and output filename, and upon submission the page would execute the script for them. I wanted it to work much like a postback, because there's no real need for redirection. ActivePerl is installed on the web server, so the perl command is in the path on that system. The files which will be converted will live on network drives that are mapped on the server, and are consistent throughout the studio.

When I run the command to convert the files on the server using Run, the script executes beautifully. However, I've used 3-4 different methods of executing the same exact function with no success. In every attempt, the input/output files were contained on a network mapped drive on the server. The page language is C#.

Attempt 1: Tried using System.Diagnostics.Process to create a process on the server, add the vital ProcessStartInfo to it and starting it. I received an error that the input file could not be opened.

Attempt 2: Used System.Diagnostics.Process with UseShellExecute = false and used StreamReader/Writers for the standard input, output and error, and used "cmd" as the executable app, and "perl scriptname fileForConversion > convertedFile" as the "arguments" for cmd. Still got an error with the input file.

Attempt 3: Tried using AspExec library from www.serverobjects.com. However, all of the examples are in VBscript, and I didn't know how to define the variable or Namespace that AspExec.Execute would be, so this method never really developed at all.

Attempt 4: I converted the perl script to an ASP page with the page language set to PerlScript. I called this page with Server.Execute("convertFPS.asp");, but I got an error stating that the child process couldn't run.

So how should I make this tool? If I need to change permissions, can someone walk me though it? It's an Intranet site, but I still want to keep as much security in the site as possible. However, I have to get this tool working, so I'm at my wit's end on this. Thanks for any help you guys can offer!!