Canceling JavaFX Service when in SCHEDULED state - javafx

I am trying to cancel my JavaFX Service using the cancel() method.
Before I call cancel(), I check the Worker state.
System.out.println(service.getState());
System.out.println(service.cancel());
The cancel() method persistently fails when the Worker is in the SCHEDULED state. cancel() returns false, and the Worker proceeds to the RUNNUNG state, before terminating as SUCCEEDED.
I cant find anything in the docs about cancel() not affecting a SCHEDULED Worker. Is this normal behaviour?

If this is the case, then you should file a bug report, as the behavior you describe directly contradicts the specified behavior in the Worker.State javadoc.
A Worker may be cancelled when READY, SCHEDULED, or RUNNING, in which case the final status will be CANCELLED. When a Worker is cancelled in one of these circumstances it will transition immediately to the CANCELLED state.
Could it be some concurrency problem with my Task?
I want somebody to answer questions about potential issues in your code, you need to edit your question to provide an MCVE.
Is there any sources that outlines reasons for why a cancel() would fail?
javafx-src.zip is included in the Oracle Java 8 JRE, you can investigate the source code to determine some of the reasons for it's behavior.

Related

FirebaseFirestore different between OnCompleteListener, OnSuccessListener, OnCanceledListener and OnFailureListener

Can someone explain me how these Listener are different from each other?
AFAIK, If I use OnCompleteListener() I can check if task complete or not and if it complete I can still check that it success or not.
I confuse that when task failed. it happens because task not complete or task not success or it can occurs in both case. And how OnCanceledListener work? When it will be called? and what is the meaning of "Called when the Task is canceled successfully."?
Please explain me, I confuse of these Listener behavior?
A Task is considered complete when the work represented by the Task is finished, regardless of its success or failure. So there may be or may be not an error, but you have to check for that. On the other side, a Task is successful when the work represented by the task is finished, as expected, with no errors.
OnFailureListener is called when a Task fails with an exception. So you can get the message from the Exception to see the reason why your Task failed.
OnCanceledListener is called when the Task is canceled successfully, which means that every Task has a cancel() method and once this method completes successfully, this listener is invoked.
Please also note, if there is a loss of network connectivity (there is no network connection on user device), neither onSuccess() nor onFailure() are triggered. This behavior makes sense, since the Task is only considered completed when the data has been committed (or rejected) on the Firebase servers.

WebAssembly blocks the web worker thread too

This is related to the previous question WebAssembly in async code
Basically, that question is about the problem of the WebAssembly blocking the main thread, and the answer to the question is to move the WebAssembly code to a web worker. That works.
The problem now is that the WebAssembly blocks the onmessage() on the worker.
My long running WebAssembly code has functions like play(), pause(), stop(), etc. The play() checks a pause flag and a stop flag periodically to determine if the play() should return. The pause() and the stop() are used to set those flags.
The JavaScript main thread calls postMessage() to send a message to the worker, which further calls the play().
Since the onmessage() is blocked, the worker will have no chance to receive further messages to do pause() or stop() until the play() is completed. That will defeat the very purposes of the pause/stop.
It seems the simple use case of play/pause/stop cannot be supported by the WebAssembly.
Any comments or suggestions?
By the way, that use case is well supported by the defunct Google PNaCl.
Thanks.
In short: Web worksers do not ignore messages even if the web worker thread is blocked.
All browsers events, including web worker postMessage()/onmessage() events are queued. This is the fundamental philosophy of JavaScript (onmessage() is done in JS even if you use WebAssembly). Have a look at "Concurrency model and Event Loop" from MDN for further detail.
So what going to happen in your case is, while onmessage() is blocked, the events from main thread postMessage() are queued automatically. When a single onmessage() job is finished in the worker thread, from the worker event queue, will check if postMessage() is called before it finishes and catch the message if there is. So you don't need to worry about that case as long as the onmessage() job takes like 10 seconds and the you get hundreds of events in the queue.
This is how asynchronous execution is done everywhere in the browser.
Considering you are targeting recent browsers (WebAssembly), you can most likely rely on SharedArrayBuffer and Atomics. Have a look at these solutions Is it possible to pause/resume a web worker externally? , which in your case will need to be handled inside WebAssembly (Atomics.wait part)

How to handle errors and retries in spring-kafka

This is a question related to :
https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-kafka/issues/575
I'm using spring-kafka 1.3.7 and transactions in a read-process-write cycle.
For this purpose, I should use a KTM on the spring kafka container to enable transaction on the whole listener process and automatic handling the transaction id based on the partition for zombie fencing(1.3.7 changes).
If I understand well from the issue #575, I can not use a RetryTemplate in a container when using a transaction manager.
How am I supposed to handle errors and retries in a such case ?
The default behavior with transaction is infinite retries ? This seems really dangerous. An unexpected exception might simply block the whole process in production.
The upcoming 2.2 release adds recovery to the DefaultAfterRollbackProcessor - so you can stop retrying after some number of attempts.
Docs Here, PR here.
It also provides an optional mechanism to send the failed record to a dead-letter topic.
If you can't move to 2.2 (release candidate due at the end of this week, with GA in October), you can provide a custom AfterRollbackProcessor with similar functionality.
EDIT
Or, you could add code to your listener (or its error handler) to keep track of how many times the same record has been delivered, and handle the error in your listener, or its listener-level error handler.

Invoke Child Workflow Activity Asynchronously

Team:
I need to invoke a WF activity (XAML) from a WF service (XAMLX) asynchronously. I am already referencing the Microsoft.Activities.Extensions framework and I'm running on the Platform Update 1 for the state machine -- so if the solution is already in one of those libraries I'm ready!
Now, I need to invoke that activity (XAML) asynchronously -- but it has an output parameter that needs to set a variable in the service (XAMLX). Can somebody please provide me a solution to this?
Thanks!
* UPDATE *
Now I can post pictures, * I think *, because I have enough reputation! Let me put a couple out here and try to better explain my problem. The first picture is the WF Service that has the two entry points for the workflow -- the second is the workflow itself.
This workflow is an orchestration mechanism that constantly restarts itself, and has some failover mechanisms (e.g. exit on error threshold and soft exit) so that we can manage our queue of durable transactions using WF!
Now, we had this workflow working great when it was all one WF Service because we could call the service, get a response back and send the value of that response back into another entry point in a trigger to issue a soft exit. However, a new requirement has arrisen asking us to make the workflow itself a WF activity in another project and have the Receive/Send-Reply sequences in the WF Service Application project.
However, we need to be able to startup this workflow and forget about it -- then let it know somehow that a soft exit is necessary later on down the road -- but since WF executes on a single thread this has become a bit challenging at best.
Strictly speaking in XAML activities Parallel and ParallelForEach are how you perform asynchrony.
The workflow scheduler only uses a single thread (much like UI) so any activity that is running will typically be running on the same thread, unless it implements AsyncCodeActivity, in which case you are simply handing back the scheduler thread to the runtime while waiting for a callback from whichever async code your AsyncCodeActivity implementation is calling.
Therefore are you sure this is what you want to achieve? Do you mean you want to run it after you have sent your initial response? In this case place your activity after the Send Reply.
Please provide more info if these suggestions don't answer your question./
Update:
The original requirement posed (separating implementation from the service Receive/Send activities) may actually be solved by hosting the target activity as a service. See the following link
http://blog.petegoo.com/index.php/2011/09/02/building-an-enterprise-workflow-system-with-wf4/

Windows workflow 4 : difference between WorkflowApplication Cancel, Terminate and Abort

Can any one explain what the difference is between the following methods of WorkflowApplication:
Abort
Cancel
Terminate
After further investigating this issue, I want to summarize the differences:
Terminate :
the Completed event of the workflow application will be triggered
the CompletionState (WorkflowApplicationCompletedEventArgs) is Faulted
the Unloaded event of the workflow application will be triggered
the workflow completes
OnBodyCompleted on the activity will be called
Cancel:
the Completed event of the workflow application will be triggered
the CompletionState (WorkflowApplicationCompletedEventArgs) is Cancelled
the Unloaded event of the workflow application will be triggered
the workflow completes
OnBodyCompleted on the activity will be called
Abort:
the Aborted event of the workflow application will be triggered
the workflow does not complete
An unhandled exception
triggers OnUnhandledException
in this eventhandler the return value (of type UnhandledExceptionAction) determines what will happen next:
UnhandledExceptionAction.Terminate will terminate the workflow instance
UnhandledExceptionAction.Cancel will cancel the workflow instance
UnhandledExceptionAction.Abort will abort the workflow instance
Each will trigger the corresponding events explained above
Update: Abort does not seem to trigger unloading of the instance in the SQL persistence store. So it seems to me, you better use Cancel or Terminate and if you have to perform some action based upon the completion status, you can check CompletionState in the Complete event.
First, hats off to Steffen Opel (and his comments below). I failed to catch that my original post linked documentation that was WF 3.5 specific. Did a little more digging around.
For posterity's sake, I have left my previous response below, labelled as WF3.5. Please see WF4.0 for a few notes regarding Canceling, Abort, and Terminate in WF4.0.
WF4.0
Unfortunately, there is little explicit documentation discussing differences in Cancel, Abort, and Terminate in WF4.0. However, from member method documentation,
On Abort, a) activity is immediately halted, b) Aborted handler is invoked, and c) Completed handler is not invoked.
On Cancel, a) activity is given a grace period to stop gracefully after which a TimeoutException is thrown, b) Completed handler is invoked.
On Terminate, a) activity is given a grace period to stop gracefully after which a TimeoutException is thrown, b) Completed handler is invoked.
The differences between Abort and Cancel/Terminate is quite striking. Simply call Abort to kill a Workflow outright. The difference between Cancel and Terminate is more nuanced. Cancel does not require any sort of reason (it is a void parameterless method), whereas Terminate requires a reason (in either string or Exception format).
In all cases, Workflow runtime will not perform any implicit action on your behalf (ie Workflows will not auto-self destruct a la WF3.5 Terminate). However, with the highly customizable exception\event handling exposed by the runtime, any such features may be implemented with relative ease.
WF3.5
Canceling
According to Msdn documentation
An activity is put into the Canceling state by a parent activity explicitly, or because an exception was thrown during the execution of that activity.
While Canceling may be used to stop an entire Workflow (ie invoked on root Activity), it is typically used to stop discrete portions of a Workflow (ie either as error-recovery or an explicit action on part of parent). In short, Canceling is a means of Workflow control-flow.
Abort and Terminate
Again, according to Msdn documentation
Abort is different from Terminate in that while Abort simply clears the in-memory workflow instance and can be restarted from the last persistence point, Terminate clears the in-memory workflow instance and informs the persistence service that the instance has been cleared from memory. For the SqlWorkflowPersistenceService, this means that all state information for that workflow instance is deleted from the database upon termination. You will not be able to reload the workflow instance from a previously stored persistence point.
Which is pretty clear in itself. Abort merely stops in-memory execution whereas Terminate stops in-memory execution and destroys any persisted state.

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