Workflow Pick activity not sending reply until Action complete - workflow-foundation-4

I have a workflow that contains a Pick activity. Each PickBranch is triggered by a WCF request. The triggered branch then sends a response to the request and performs an Action activity. But the behaviour I'm seeing indicates the response is not being sent until the Action activity is complete which is causing the original request to timeout, depending on how long the Action activity takes to complete.
In the PickBranch above, I'm adding work orders to a mobile database. Each work order takes up to 16 seconds to be added to the database. As the number of work orders increases, the greater the likelihood that the original request will timeout. What am I doing wrong?

Ok, I think I have a resolution for this. As per Maurice's answer here, I added a Delay activity following the SendReplyToReceive and the workflow then started behaving as expected.

Just tested this and it works fine. If I have a Pick with a send and receive inside a trigger and a delay inside the action, the reply is received immediately.
Are you sure the Request on your SendReply activity appears to be set correctly?
Patrick is still right, you should implement your database activity as an AsyncCodeActivity but this would not be the reason for your reply being delayed.

I my experience checking PersistBeforeSend on SendReplyToReceive to True fixes this problem. Putting Persist block after SendReplyToReceive also helps.

This is working as intended. If the operations take such a long time, would you be better served by calling them asynchronously? Check out AsyncCodeActivity here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.activities.asynccodeactivity.aspx

Related

Out of order race condition

When a workflow has a receive activity that occurs after another receive activity and the second receive activity is called first the workflow holds the caller by blocking for 1 minute before timing out.
I want the workflow to return immediately when there are no matching workflow instances.
I do not want to change the timeout on the client as some calls may take a while.
This is a known issue in WF4, at least I am not aware of it being fixed yet.

Flex Remote Object multiple parallel calls

I'm on Flash Builder 4.5 and I'm using remote object with amfphp and when I call two method (method1 and method2) at the same time the response of method2 always arrives after method1's response even though method2 is much more faster to return the result.
Here's the scenario:
I set a remote object which refers to a remote php class "Newsletter" which contains the sendNewsletter and getProgress methods.
Here's the code:
-sendNewsletter() reads the email archive and send the newsletter. After each email has sent it writes a log into the database.
-getProgress() reads the log wrote by sendNewsletter, counts how many email have been sent, compares it with the total number of the email that have to be sent and return the progress percentage
From the flex interface the users select a Newsletter to be sent and click on a "send" button which calls a function that calls the sendNewsletter() and then instantiate a loop of calls to getProgress (as you can see when getProgress returns something it calls the setProgress which updates a progress bar and calls getProgress again until the progress percentage reach 100%.
So right after I call sendNewsletter() I call getProgress() on the same remoteClass().
sendNewsletter() can take several minutes to complete (in my tests for sending 4 email it takes about 4 seconds so I think that sending thousands of email will take much more!!) and the trouble I'm encountering here is that getProgress() result arrives only after sendNewsletter() concludes its execution while what I would like to achieve is:
-call sendNewsletter()
-while sendNewsletter() does its stuff() call getProgress several time in order to get the progress percentage:
What I've got now:
call to sendNewsletter()----------------------->response
call to getProgress()------------------------------------->response after sendNewsletter()
What I want to achieve:
sendNewsletter()------------------------------------------------------------------>response()
getProgress()--->response, getProgress() again--->response-->getProgress()-->respone-->etc...
I read many post on how to work around this problem but no solution worked for me.
I tried to to "emulate" to different channel by creating two remote object with endpoint set once to gateway.php?parallel=0 and once gateway.php?parallel=1, but flash builder still send everything in one big request and get the response in one big http packet (I need tow different packet since sendNewsletter takse ages to complete compared to getProgress)
I also tried to delay the call of getProgress() after sendNewsletter() with a Timer of 500ms and flash builder makes two different calls (I can see them in firebug) but the call of getProgress gives response after sendNewsletter() anyway.
I alse tried to call sendNewsletter this way
this.myNewsletter.getOperation("sendNewsletter").send(idNewsletter)
this.myNewsletter.getOperation("sendNewsletter").cancel()
in order to let flash builder forget about the response but no way!!!
So far the only way to work around I found is creating a common httpservice which refers to a php which instantiate the Newsletter class and calls the getProgress method.
By using two different channel I can call the getProgress httpservice while sendNewsletter is being execute. It works but I don't like it and I don't want to create an httpservice for each method I need to call in background, so I want to achieve this with remote object only.
Anyone has addressed the same problem?
You Flash builder guru, I know you're around, please help me!!!!!
Thanks in advance!!!
Bye,
Luke
P.S.
sorry if this post is a little bit long but the situation it's quite complicated.
I don't know exactly, what you want to..
But when working with Remote Object, there is a best practices to use Responder to handle the responses that were arrived parallel from the single Remote Object.
So try to add responder to your service calls like
remoteObject.methodCall().addResponder(new YourResponder(resultEvent, faultEvent));
So when specific response will be come, it will be handled by your different custom responders.
And by that you will be able to handle your response separately.

How to debug unresponsive async NSURLConnection

and by unresponsive I mean that after the first three successful connections, the fourth connection is initiated and nothing happens, no crashes, no delegate functions called, no data is sent out (according to wireshark)... it just sits there?!
I've been beating my head against this for a day and half...
iOS 4.3.3
latest xCode, happens the same way on a real device as in the simulator.
I've read all the NSURLConnection posts in the Developer Forums... I'm at a loss.
From my application delegate, I kick off an async NSURLConnection according to Apple docs, using the App Delegate as the delegate for the NSURLConnection.
From my applicationDidFinishLaunching... I trigger the initial two queries which successfully return XML that I then pass off to a OperationQueue to be parsed.
I can even loop, repeating these queries with no issues, repeated them 10 times and worked just fine.
The next series of five queries are triggered via user input. The first query runs successfully and returns the correct response, then the next query is created and when used to create a NSURLConnection (just like all the others), just sits there.?!
The normal delegate calls I see on all the other queries are never seen.
Nothing goes over the wire according to Wireshark?
I've reordered the queries and regardless of the query, after the first one the next one fails (fails as in does nothing, no errors or aborts, just sits there)
It's obviously in my code, but I am blind to it.
So what other tools can I use to debug the async NSURLConnection... how can I tell what it's doing? if at all.
Any suggestions for debugging a NSURLConnection or other ways accomplish doing the same thing a NSURLConnection does??
Thanks for any help you can offer...
OK tracked it down...
I was watching the stack dump in each thread as I was about to kick off each NSURLConnection, the first three were all in the main thread as expected... the fourth one ended up in a new thread?! In one of my NSOperation thread?!?!
As it turns out I inadvertently added logic(?) that started one my NSURLConnection in the last NSOperation call to didFinishParsing: so the NSURLConnection was async started and then the NSOperation terminated... >.<
So I'll move the NSURLConnection out of the didFinishParsing and it should stay in the main loop and I should be good!

flash.net.Socket "complete event"

Is there any way to know if data is completely received on the other end of a flash.net.Socket? Like a complete event? Based on the event documentation there is none. If there is no way, what are the alternative strategies?
The beauty of Flash is that you don't need to. Flash handles it for you after it's sent. It gets queued, sent over the wire and awaits confirmation (as per the protocol). If there's a problem, an error event will be dispatched and the fault object will have the specifics of the error.
If there's a problem in the transmission (like disconnection, bad route, etc), it will retry 3 times I believe in a span of 30 seconds (timeout). I believe these numbers can be changed, but I wouldn't if I were you. They're pretty much the most optimal in my experience.

Practical value for concurrent-request-timeout parameter or options for avoiding concurrent access to conversation exception

In the Seam Reference Guide, one can find this paragraph:
We can set a sensible default for the concurrent request timeout (in ms) in components.xml:
<core:manager concurrent-request-timeout="500" />
However, we found that 500 ms is not nearly enough time for most of the cases we had to deal with, especially with the severe restriction seam places on conversation access.
In our application we have a combination of page scoped ajax requests (triggered by various user actions), some global scoped polling notification logic (part of the header, so included in every page) and regular links that invoke actions and/or navigate to other pages.
Therefore, we get the dreaded concurrent access to conversation exception way too often, even without any significant load on the site.
After researching the options for quite a bit, we ended up bumping this value to several seconds (we're debating whether to bump it up to 10s), as none of the recommended solutions seemed able to solve our issue completely (even forcing a global queue for all the ajax requests would still leave us exposed to a user deciding to click a link right when one of our polling calls was in progress). And we'd much rather have the users wait for a second or two instead of getting an error page just because they clicked a link at the wrong moment.
And now to the question: is there something obvious we're missing (like a way to allow concurrent access to conversations and taking care of the needed locking ourselves, for instance :)? How do people solve this problem (ajax requests mixed with user driven interaction) in seam? Disabling all the links on the page while ajax requests are in progress (as suggested by one blog page) is really not a viable option.
Any other suggestions?
TIA,
Andrei
We use 60000 or 120000 (1-2 minutes). Concurrent-request-timeout is designed to avoid deadlocks. Historically we have far more problems with timeouts than deadlocks. A better approach is to use a client-side queue (<a4j:ajaxQueue> if using RichFaces) to serialize and remove duplicate requests as much as possible, then set the timeout high enough to avoid any remaining problems.
There are many serious issues resulting from Seam's concurrent request timeouts:
The issue is the last request gets the ConcurrentRequestTimeoutException. If the user double-clicks or reloads the page, only the last request matters -- why should he get an error?
Usually the ConcurrentRequestTimeoutException is suppressed, and only secondary NullPointerExceptions and #In injection failures are shown, making debugging difficult.
Seam 2.2.1 has a severe problem where transactions, ThreadLocals, and locks may leak after a timeout occurs, especially when used with <spring:spring-transaction/>. Look at SeamPhaseListener.afterRestoreView: there's no finally block to clean up after restoreConversation fails!
In my opinion there are many poor aspects to this design, so it's best to use a much higher timeout and try to avoid the issues.
This is what we have and it works fine for us:
<core:manager concurrent-request-timeout="5000"
conversation-timeout="120000" conversation-id-parameter="cid"
parent-conversation-id-parameter="pid" />
We also use a much higher value for the concurrent-request-timeout.
At least for duplicate events you can use settings in the a4j components to filter and delay them with eventsQueue, requestDelay and ignoreDupResponses=”true”.
(Last point http://docs.jboss.org/seam/2.0.1.GA/reference/en/html/conversations.html )
Can you analyse which types of request are taking a long time? Is there a particular type which you could reduce the request time by doing the "work" asynchronously and getting the update back in your poll?
In my opinion, ajax requests should always complete fairly quickly, then you can calculate a max concurrent request time by (request time * max number of requests likely to be initiated)

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