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Saturday, October 27, 2007
I recently created a random quotes generator to be put up on my website. The code could be used to produce any random text on your website, where the text is defined in a XML file.
The following is the XML file for use with the code:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
Save this file as quotes.xml in your ASP.NET project. Now open the page where you would like to place these random quotes. Create 2 labels in the page design with ids 'labelquote' and 'labelquoteauthor':
<quotes>
<quote id="1">
<text>sample quote</text>
<author>sample author</author>
</quote>
<quote id="2">
<text>another quote</text>
<author>another author</author>
</quote>
.
.
<quote id="15">
<text>yet another quote</text>
<author>quote author</author>
</quote>
</quotes>
<asp:Label ID="labelquote" runat="server"&rt;</asp:Label&rt;
<asp:Label ID="labelquoteauthor" runat="server"&rt;</asp:Label&rt;
Now, add the following code to the 'Page_Load' method of this page:string strquote;
In the above code, the while loop reads all the lines of the Xml file and the quote having the specific random id is displayed.
string strquoteauthor;
Random r = new Random();
int random = r.Next(1, 15);
XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(Server.MapPath("quotes.xml"));
while (reader.Read())
{
if (reader.Name == "quote" &&
reader.GetAttribute("id") == random.ToString())
{
while (reader.Name != "text")
reader.Read();
strquote = reader.ReadElementContentAsString();
while (reader.Name != "author")
reader.Read();
strquoteauthor = reader.ReadElementContentAsString();
}
}
labelquote.Text = strquote;
labelquoteauthor.Text = strquoteauthor;
You can also, make a user control from this code which you can add to each page or the master page of your website.
The above image is produced using normal ASCII characters. It is generated by a C# code written by