The File Transfer Protocol is a system for transferring
files between two computers over the Internet. One of the computers
is known as server and the other one is the client. The FTP
program is very useful for website management as the webmaster can
update the web pages by uploading the local files to the web server
at a fast speed. For normal PC users, the FTP program can also be used to download files from
many FTP sites that offer a lot of useful stuffs such as free software,
free games, product information, applications, tools, utilities,
drivers, fixes and more.
The FTP program usually comprises an interface that shows
the directories of the local computer and the the directories of the remote server. Files can
be transferred just by clicking the relevant arrows. To log
into the FTP site, we need to enter the user name and the
password; however, for public domains, we just need to type the word
anonymous as the user name and leave out the password. The FTP
host name takes the form
ftp.servername.com, for example, the Microsoft FTP site's host name
is
ftp.microsoft.com while the Netscape FTP site is
ftp.netscape.com.
The FTP program usually provides a set of commands such
as ChgDir (changing directory), MkDir (Changing directory), Rename
(renaming a file), view (to view a file), delete (to delete a file) and
etc.
Visual Basic allows you to build a fully functionally FTP
program which may be just as good as the commercial FTP programs. The
engine behind it is the Microsoft Internet Transfer Control 6.0
in which you need to insert your form before you can create the FTP
program. The name of the Microsoft Internet Transfer Control 6.0.is
Inet and if you only insert one control, its name will be
Inet1.
Inet1
comprises three important properties namely Inet1.URL that is
used to identify the FTP hostname, inet1.UserName that is used to
accept the username and the Inet1.Password that is used to accept
the user�s passwords. The statements for the program to read the
hostname of the server, the username and the password entered into
Textbox1, Textbox2 and Textbox3 by the user are shown below:
Inet1.URL=Text1.Text
Inet1.UserName=Text2.Text
Inet1.Passoword=Text3.Text
After the user entered the above information, the program
will attempt to connect to the server using the following command, where
Execute is the method and DIRis the FTP command that will read the list
of files from the specified directory of the remote computer and you
need to use the getChunk method to actually retrieve the
directory�s information.
Inet1.Execute,
"DIR"
After connecting to the server, you can choose the file
from the remote computer to download by using the statement below:
Inet1.Execute, , "get" & remotefile & localfile
where remotefile is the file of the remote site and
localfile is the file of the local system. However, very often you need
to provide the full path of the local file, which you can do that by
modifying the above syntax to the following syntax:
Inet1.Execute , , "get" & remotefile & localpath & remotefile
The above statements will ensure that the remote file
will be downloaded to the location specified by the localpath and the
file downloaded will assume the same name as the remote file. For
example, the remote file is readme.txt and the localpath is
C:\temp , so the downloaded file will be saved in
C:\temp\readme.txt.
The Login Dialog
The FTP Interface
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