Calling JSP from a batch file

By: Emiley J. in JSP Tutorials on 2008-03-24

If you wondering why in the world should I call a JSP from a batch file then read on. In fact, my problem was to schedule a task that runs every day on a specific time and must generate a report for my management and email the same. Searching the net I was able to accomplish this by combining VB and batch files. But I was not happy with the results. Or to be more specific, my management was not happy with the type of report I was generating in terms of formatting etc.

What the management wanted was a nicely formatted report just as our internal WEB based reports. Now I realised that I have already a JSP that generates the report, now I only have to do two things.

Modify the JSP to instead of displaying, just generate the report in HTML format and then email it
Secondly I must find a way to schedule this emailing to auto email every day at a specific time.

So I have answered the question as to the necessity of calling a JSP from a batch file. Now that I have decided on what to do, I set search on how to do this. Then I found that batch file by itself cannot accomplish this, therefore I would need a combination of a batch file and a vbscript file (VBS).

So assuming you have a JSP page that generates the report and emails it. Do the following to automate the report generation:

1. Create a text file and copy the following content into it:


  Option Explicit

  Dim objIEA

  Set objIEA = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")

  objIEA.Navigate "http://192.17.12.10/emailreport.jsp"
  (This should be changed to your actual url)

  objIEA.visible = true

  While objIEA.Busy

  Wend

  objIEA.Quit

  Set objIEA = Nothing

2. Rename the text file to report.vbs

3. Create a batch file and name it as report.bat and copy the following content in that batch file.