In this article, I'm going to talk about a simple ASP.NET application I recently created for the Slovak parliament. The application allows browsing and displaying transcripts of parliamentary debates (see http://www.nrsr.sk/bin/net/nrozprava/; Slovak language only).

The transcripts are stored as plain text files. Each text file contains transcript for a given time frame, which is encoded in the file's name. All the text files are stored in a single file system folder. How the debate's audio records get transcripted and how the text files make their way into the folder is not important for this discussion.

The job of the ASP.NET application is, among others, to display the list of transcripts with associated time frames and allow the user to view the contents of selected transcripts. In order for the transcript files to be more readable to the user, the application applies some basic HTML formatting to the transcript's plain text before it is sent to the browser for viewing. For various reasons, I've designed the formatting process to take place dynamically whenever a user requests a given transcript file.