Long Polling does not hit hub class? - signalr

When the browser says long polling but the debugger in the constructor of hub class does not hit. What is the problem?
Basically what I want is everytime the long polling happens, I also want a particular functionality like a database call to be executed.

poll requests are receive channel (i.e. are only used by the server to send data to the client if there is any) and as the result they don't cause instantiating hubs. However you can override the ProcessRequest method on the server side - it is being called for each HTTP request the server is receiving so you can do whatever you want there.

Related

Write to a list of websockets in tornado from another url handler

I am creating a web application which has a websocket handler. On each successful connection i am appending the websocket handler object to a list.
Another handler class called PostResultHandler accepts POST data. This PostResultHandler will be called by a background process which sends json data. Once this json data is received by PostResultHandler, I want write to the list of websockets.
Currently I am just iterating through the list of websockets and writing the json data to it. But i think it may be a blocking call and the background process which calls the PostResultHandler will be blocked until the result is written to all websockets.
Is there any way to make this piece of code non blocking so that the background process will keep running without any delay
The Tornado examples folder includes a chat demo with websockets, it simply does:
for waiter in cls.waiters:
try:
waiter.write_message(chat)
except:
logging.error("Error sending message", exc_info=True)
This is not a blocking call. The message is buffered on the server immediately and your code continues executing.
Best possible option is to add a callback on ioloop to send the data for each websocket handler instance. You can do something like following.
tornado.ioloop.IOloop.instance().add_callback(partial(websocket_handler_instance.write_message, msg))

SignalR - Sending from server-to-client from latest Hub context

I have a simple demo with only 1 client and the server. I can send messages back and forth, very trivial stuff.
The server Hub has a timer which sends a message to the client(s) every 1000 milliseconds. Now I have a button, where when clicked, sends a message to the server (via signalR).
Problem:
When the button is clicked (and the message sent to the server), the Hub is instantiated each time (I read about the SignalR lifecycle here).
Of course, when the Hub is instantiated the Timer is also instantiated. So the side effect (ie. bug) that I am seeing is that messages are being send to the client from multiple Hub instances.
What I would like:
I would like the client to receive messages (from the Timer that is running on the Hub), but only 1 set of messages from a single Hub (latest Hub instance?). I do not want simultaneous/multiple messages that were spawned from each Hub that was instantiated.
But perhaps I am doing something drastically wrong in design here.
You shouldn´t set the timer in the hub instance because they are re-created on every request.
Just create a Singleton class to handle the timer and actions. Then access that singleton from your hub instance.
The singleton instance will persist during the whole live cycle of your application, thus you will create only one timer.
To avoid concurrency problems, your singleton should be Lazy

How SignalR broadcast the messages?

Have started using SignalR. Would like to clear few queries regarding how SignalR have implemented broadcasting basically how server is able to initiate the Communication ?
1> In normal scenario whenever we request for a let say .aspx page, the server renders the page and returns the reponse back to the client and the things is done
But How SignalR is able to continously able to execute in Background/Async in case of Ticker demo available on the ASP.net site.
I googled little bit and found IRegisteredObject is one of the way where the the object which need to be excuted continously need to register with HostingEnvironment but for that the class have to implement the IRegisteredObject interface but in case of ticker demo none of the class implements the IRegisteredObject interface.
Am I mssing something over here or SignalR uses totally different technique ?
SignalR utilizes 4 transports through which it handles data from the server. Only one transport is used at a time but SignalR has 4 to ensure server/client communication on a wide variety of devices/browsers. Here's the transports and a short technical description:
Long Polling, to receive data it uses an ajax request whose response is not released until there is data available on the server, once the server returns data on the held onto response the client then creates another request and waits for the next batch of data. To send data it creates a second ajax request.
Forever Frame, uses iframes through which the server pushes down javascript text which is then executed in the iframe, the iframe then propagates the execution up to the parent page which then handles the data. To send data SignalR uses ajax requests.
Server Sent Events, uses the EventSource object. Supported in nearly everything but IE. The EventSource object opens up a one way pipe through which the server can pump data through, allowing the client to receive data in real time. To send data SignalR uses ajax requests.
Web Sockets, uses the built-in browser WebSocket object which opens up a single, bi-directional channel through which data can be received and sent.
That's the essence of each of SignalR's transports, you can see an hour presentation in which David Fowler and Damian Edwards create a Lite version of SignalR here. It essentially highlights how SignalR works under the covers.

Invoke client side method synchronously with SignalR

How can the web server invoke a method on the client synchronously using SignalR? The key part here is that the server should wait for client to send data back to the server before continuing on?
Basically I'm looking to treat a client method invoke like a WCF service request. Invoke the client and wait for the data to be returned.
SignalR does not provide a way to synchronously invoke client-side methods.
To achieve the same functionality as a synchronous call, you could pass some sort of invocation ID as an argument to your client-side method. The client could then invoke a server-side method like ClientMethodCompleted with its invocation ID when the client-side method is done. Basically you will be implementing your own ACK.
If you go this route, you will have to track the client invocations along with their respective ID's on the server. You can then execute whatever logic you would have done after a synchronous call in the ClientMethodCompleted method on the server.
This should be fairly simple if you are invoking the method on only one client. If you are invoking the method on multiple clients you will have to keep track of which clients you are invoking your method on so you can ensure all the clients have acknowledged the invocation before running your followup code.
I would also make sure that you periodically clean up the data structure storing unacknowledged client invocations if you are at all worried about a DOS attack, since this would be an obvious attack vector that could allow a malicious client blowup memory consumption.

How to send status information from a Web service while is being executed?

I'm new to web development so I'm not sure what's the best option for the problem that I'm having.
Basically I have a web application that calls a web service for processing some data.
This process may take a long time (hours) and I would to know if there is an easy way to send some status information to the client from time to time.
Right now, the client makes the request from the browser and it just waits there until it finishes.
How can I send some information from the web service? I would like to send a percentage and some additional text specifying what is being done.
Thanks
WCF services can be marked as [OneWay] so that they don't return a response.
or, you could have the service kick off the process in an async manner and then just return to the client that the process has/or hasn't kicked off.
Then, the client can poll another method as the other user has suggested.
If you process takes hours you definitely can't use a sync service because you'll hit your execution timeout or rather the connection timeout for the client.
Maybe you can poll another method for status?
If I were you, I would make the original request asynchronous, as in instead of waiting for the response, it just "starts" the task and returns immediately. Then I would have a separate method on your web service that the app can poll periodically to get the status of the job. once it completes, it can display the data like the original request was doing.
if you want to do it synchronously, you can turn off Response.Buffer and write directly to the response.

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