NNTP is similar to the SMTP service provided by IIS, in that it consists of a directory structure and text files that adhere to protocol standards. Because of this standard, you can expose NNTP functionality in your Web site or other application by using the FileSystem Object that is included with the Windows 2000 operating system.
For example, a newsgroup called support is located on the server1 NNTP server. This newsgroup was previously configured in IIS. There are two messages contained in the support newsgroup on the news server. The file structure on the server machine contains two text files located in the c:\inetpub\nntpfile\root\support
As demonstrated in the example on SMTP (Sending Mail) you can easily manipulate files contained in a directory on the IIS machine. In the SMTP example we created a file, in this example we will list the contents of the NNTP directory and open a file and view the contents in a Web browser:
<html>
<head>
<title>NNTP Reader</title>
</head>
<body>
<%
CONST PATH_INFO = "c:\inetpub\nntpfile\root\support\"
Sub ShowFileList
Dim i, FileType, fs, f, fc
Set fs = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set f = fs.GetFolder(PATH_INFO)
Set fc = f.SubFolders
Set fc = f.Files
For Each f1 in fc
For i = 1 To 4
If i = 1 Then
Response.Write " <a “ & _
“href=nntp.asp?action=open&file=" & _
PATH_INFO & f1.name & ">" & f1.name & "</a><br>"
End If
Next
Next
Set fs = Nothing
End Sub
Function OpenTextFile(PathInfo)
Dim fs, InStream
Set fs = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set InStream = fs.OpenTextFile (PathInfo, 1, False, False)
OpenTextFile = Instream.ReadALL
InStream.Close
Set InStream = Nothing
Set fs = Nothing
End Function
If Request("Action") = "open" Then
Response.Write "<pre>" & OpenTextFile(Request("file")) & "</pre>"
Else
ShowFileList
End If
%>
</body>
</html>
In the preceding block of code, the first thing we do is the list the files that are contained in the NNTP directory. The user can then click on the file name to view its contents. You could further extend this script by opening the file and pulling out the NNTP header for the subject and displaying that to the user instead of the filename, and then parse the headers when viewing the message to present a better format to the user.
Extending upon this method can allow you to provide an integrated messaging application that is viewable in a Web browser and in a newsgroup reader like Outlook Express. You can also extend upon this by taking advantage of the search capabilities of Indexing services to provide a search mechanism for the Web application.
By: Patrick Santry, Microsoft MVP (ASP/ASP.NET), developer of this site, author of books on Web technologies, and member of the DotNetNuke core development team. If you're interested in the services provided by Patrick, visit his company Website at Santry.com.
