I'm new to WF4 and was wondering if it was possible to send a reply to a receive activity defined in another workflow?
Once my WCF service receives a request I'm performing an operation in another activity and under certain conditions I want to send a reply to the request from this activity and then pause the workflow for further input. Is it possible to do this?
Thanks!
No that won't work. The Receive and the SendReply need to be linked to each other using an activity correlation handle.
What you can do however is use duplex communications where the second workflow sends a SOAP message to an endpoint with an address passed to it in the first message. Technically these are two separate requests and not related so there are no restrictions.
Related
I am stuck in a problem while using Kafka in a microservice architecture . I am not able to understand how a microservice handling HTTP requests will be able to send a response to the user. I want to take data from HTTP and then publish it to topic named A then another validator service will validate it and publish it on another topic named B. I want to send processed data to HTTP response from subscribed data from topic B.
In my experience, one option is to respond immediately with 201 accepted, or embed a blocking validator library into your API, and properly return a 400 Bad Request.
Then future GET calls are required to read eventually consistent data that might come back from any consumer. E.g. the consumer process is Kafka Connector that writes to some database, or is a Kafka Streams/KSQL table, future API queries will return data from that. Your original client may need to make periodic HTTP calls until that data is available.
Let's imagine I have a REST API with an endpoint /api/status. When this endpoint is accessed, the API sends a message to a message queue requesting the status of some other service.
Then in reply, the service sends a message with its status to a queue on which the REST API listens. So it's single message to request the status and single reply message.
My question is: Is there a design pattern for converting the asynchronous nature of this approach to a synchronous one in the API? In other words: Is there a pattern that the GetStatus(...) method in the pseudo code below can implement to synchronize the getting of the status with communication over multiple message queues or even pub/sub systems.
var statusRequestMsg = "get_status";
var statusResponseMsg = GetStatus(statusRequestMsg);
I know how to solve this in code but I was curious if there is a design patter that introduces a common approach.
I googled a lot in search for that but the only think that I found was a very technical explanation of an approach to do that in this article:
A Communication Model to Integrate the Request-Response and the Publish-Subscribe Paradigms into Ubiquitous Systems
Please note that I understand that this is not the perfect API design and that there are better ways to implement the example. I've created the above example to help me illustrate my question. Also I understand that some AMQP impl. (like RabbitMQ) provide a way to synchronize MQ communication to request/response style.
Thanks in advance.
Microsoft calls it Async Request Reply pattern and uses a solution that polls over HTTP:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/async-request-reply
I imagine it should be possible to avoid polling by subscribing to updates for a key. For example, it's possible to subscribe to updates to a single key in Redis with keyspace notifications (The page mentions two caveats: that "all the events delivered during the time the client [is] disconnected are lost" and "events' notifications are not broadcasted to all nodes".)
Have you considered something like this:
Request comes in
Create a correlation id
Send correlation id to other service as part of message sent via queue
Begin polling for that id in some data store (say Redis)
Time elapses...
Send correlation id back to originating service along with result of request in a message sent via queue
Worker reading queue sets value of correlation id in data store to result of asynchronous request
Polling discovers result and returns in as response to request
Would that work?
I am working on prototyping a new web service for my company and we are considering Apache Camel as our integration framework. Here is a quick run-down of the high-level architecture:
-IBM Websphere MQ as the queuing solution
1) we receive http request
2) asynchronously persist this request
3a) do some processing on the request
3b) send to another tier for further processing
4) asynchronously update the request record in DB
5) respond to caller
What I want to do is:
When a http request comes in, put it on a queue to be processed and wait n seconds. If the web handler doesn't get a response in n seconds, reply to the caller with a custom message
Once the request is on the processing queue, a camel route is listening to this queue to process. When it pulls a message from queue, put a copy of the request on a different queue to be persisted asynchronously. Do some processing on the request. Then send it to another queue to be further processed and wait for a response. Then put it back on the persist queue to be asynchronously updated.
Then respond to web listener. Then web listener responds to web caller.
I am reading everything I can about Apache Camel and there is a lot of information about there. I might be on a little bit of information overload, and any help on the following concerns would be greatly appreciated:
1)
If the web listeners use an InOut exchange (with the first processing tier) without a replyTo queue defined, it will create a temporary queue for the response. What happens if this request times out? I understand I can set a requestTimeout on the exchange and, if it times out, catch that exception and set a custom message. But, will that temporary queue be killed? Or will they build up over time as requests time out?
2)
When it comes to scaling the processing tiers (adding more instances of those same routes on different machines), is it customary that if the instance that picks up the response (using a fixed reply to queue) is different than the instance that picked up the request, all the information about the original request is inside the message, so there is no need to share data across instances (unless of course there is data that is shared, like aggregrates and such)?
Any other tips and tricks when building a system like this would be very helpful.
Thanks!
I would say this solution is too complicated and there are too many areas which are hard both in terms of maintenance and also complexity. There is too much many steps mixing async and sync communication.
Why not simply the solution to the following steps:
Synchronously http request
Put message on MQ with reply to header
Message is picked up and sent to backend
If reply is not received within a given time transaction is terminated.
The reply to queue is removed
Requestor is notified.
I am using SignalR for the 1st time in my asp.net c# web app.
I am using HTML 5 and JavaScript for my client web page.
In essence whenever my server has an image to 'push' to my clients it does so. Sometimes this can be quite frequent.
Now, I imagine during a 'busy' period' my client(s) could be 'over-whelmed' by the data being pushed by my server?
How does my server know that the message has been recieved by my client (or not) and then proceed to send the next one?
SignalR doesn't provide a built-in way to wait for a client to receive a message. This would be very difficult to do in the general case where someone might be using Clients.All, and clients might be connecting/reconnecting/disconnecting at the time the message is sent.
However, it is possible to manually acknowledge that you have received a message on the client (perhaps by calling some hub method on the server), and then continue to send the next message once the acknowledgement (ACK) for the previous one has been received.
I have a WF 4 service. I have the following sequence:
Receive activity
Some Other activities
SendReply
Other Activities
I have an asp.net calling this service.
Why does this client has to wait for all steps to complete?
I want that when step 3 is completed, the reply is sent to the client and the client can continue on its own.
any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
The response is ready to send but due to the async nature of WF4 it isn't actually send directly. You can either persist the workflow, using the PersistBeforeSend, or add a small sub second delay using a Delay activity.
When the Workflow hits the SendReply block it should send the reply at that point and allow the client to continue on. You could test that by putting a delay in of a couple of minutes at Step 4.
Is it possible that the steps after the SendReply are completing so quickly that it just looks like the Workflow is running those steps before sending the reply?