Copy webcontent to Citrix NS/AG from FTP site through a Cron job

I have a customer who would like the Citrix NetScaler (Access Gateway and AAA website) website to dynamically retrieve files to show customized content without web developers entering the Citrix NetScaler on a frequent basis.

One thing you do have to remember is that over-customizing the Citrix Access Gateway portal page is in fact not supported by Citrix. I do not think there are a lot of people out there who actually know this. Now, they will not act very difficult if you alter a picture here or there or customize a little text, but be aware of over-customizing. Next to support issues, you can run into trouble when new Citrix NetScaler updates come out that are not going to be aware of your customizations.

Now, this particulair customer over-customizes a lot! What they wanted is to have an iFrame in the Access Gateway (and AAA) page which showed visitors updated news, links, RSS Feeds etc. This iFrame showed the content of a Microsoft Sharepoint environment (please, don’t ask why). We tried publishing this iFrame through Citrix Netcaler but did not work (long story short, it was because of Microsoft Sharepoint). So now we came up with the idea to copy this content periodially to the Citrix NetScaler through the use of a Cron job and FTP. (See image below).