Cancel an ASP.NET callback processing - asp.net

I am loading a gridview using a code based on this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms366515%28v=VS.80%29.aspx
I am using callbacks to populate the grid, sometimes there is a lot of data or the user wants to cancel.
How can I cancel the callback from being processed on the server when user hit cancel??
thanks

Searched quite extensively and found that it is possible to Cancel Server Tasks with ASP.NET & AJAX
Although I'm not good with AJAX, Found some links that will help you,
Here's how to Canceling Server Tasks with ASP.NET & AJAX and here's a forum thread on something similar to your problem.
Hope it helped !

AFAIK, you cannot cancel the server side call back processing once initiated. At the most, you can have some client (browser) side logic that will ignore callback results.
Regardless, I will suggest you to use ASP.NET AJAX (UpdatePanel or Script Services) rather than using ICallbackEventHandler. It's quite simple to use and more flexible. Besides, you also have options such as cancelling callbacks : see this article for cancelling update panel callback (note that cancel really means stop waiting for (& ignoring) callback results, the server side processing would happen).

Once you've initiated a request to the server, the client cannot cancel it. Ignoring the mechanics around any possible "cancellable method", you've started a request with the server. Any further communication will result in a new request, so that original request will continue until it has finished. Remember HTTP is a stateless protocol, each request has no knowledge of any previous request, and because of that, how could it cancel a previous request?
You're best bet would be to just ignore the server response, or if you actually need to cancel a long running task that may still be processing on the server, you need to bake in that support yourself, as the web server will not natively support it. To do that, you'll likely need some way of persisting the task state across multiple http requests, and have the original request (the one running that task) be monitoring some sort of cancellation flag.
Just remember though, in the above scenario, you wouldn't be cancelling the request, but the task the request is running.

Related

Invoking timed tasks in asynchronous Jax-RS requests

I've joined a project that uses Jax-RS (and originally there was quite a bit of Spring-based Controller code in there too, but all URL handlers use Jax-RS now). Now we want to be able to fill in a queue of tasks that should be run with a small delay between each of them. The delay can be specified in ms. I've avoided Thread.sleep, as I've heard you should not manage threads manually in Java EE. Before I came in there was already a busy wait loop implemented.
I would like to switch this to an asynchronous background task. I could of course let the client poll the server with the given delay, and just have an AsyncResponse that can be resumed. But can the same AsyncResponse be resumed/suspended multiple times? The resource does have state, so it would be possible to drop the asynchrony completely and just do client polling to handle all of it.
A lot of example code for showing off asynchronous tasks use Thread.sleep. How bad is it to do this in a background task on an ExecutorService or something similar?
The point of the delay is to simulate human interaction, and post a long list of JMS messages to a queue but ensure that two listeners don't pick up and handle messages that depend on one another.
Is it easier/better to handle this on the client side rather than the server side? Writing some JavaScript that handles all the polling would be quite simple, so if this seems like a bad idea for handling on the server side, it's not that big a deal.
The tool is only going to be used by a single user, as it's a developer testing tool. Therefore we went for solving this on the client side, pushing the messages onto the queue through AJAX calls. This works fine for our purposes, but if anyone has a solution that might help someone else. Feel free to drop a new answer.

handling XMLHttpRequest abort on asp.net

I use asynchronous XMLHttpRequest to call a function in ASP.net web service.
When I call an abort method on the XMLHttpRequest, after the server has received the request and processing it, the server continues processing the request.
Is there a way to stop the request processing on the server?
Generally speaking, no, you can't stop the request being processed by the server once it has started. After all, how would the server know when a request has been aborted?
It's like if you navigated to a web page but browsed to another one before the first one had loaded. That initial request will, at least to some extent (any client-side work will of course not take place), be fulfilled.
If you do wish to stop a long-running operation on the server, the service that is being invoked will need to be architected such that it can support being interrupted. Some psuedo code:
void MyLongRunningMethod(opId, args)
{
work = GetWork(args)
foreach(workItem in work)
{
DoWork(workItem)
//Has this invocation been aborted?
if(LookUpSet.Contains(opId))
{
LookUpSet.Remove(opId)
return
}
//Or try this:
if(Response.IsClientConnected)
{
HttpContext.Current.Response.End();
return;
}
}
}
void AbortOperation(opId)
{
LookUpSet[opId] = true
}
So the idea here is that MyLongRunningMethod periodically checks to see if it has been aborted, returning if so. It is intended that opId is unique, so you could generate it based on the session Id of the client appended with the current time or something (in Javascript, new Date().getTime() will get you the number of milliseconds since the epoch).
With this sort of approach, the server must maintain state (the LookUpSet in my example), so you will need some way of doing that, such as a database or just storing it in memory. The service will also need to be architected such that calling abort does not leave things in a non-working state, which of course depends very heavily on what it does.
The other really important requirement is that the data can be split up and worked on in chunks. This is what allows the service to be interruptable.
Finally, if some operation is to be aborted, then AbortOperation must be called - simply aborting the XMLHttpRequest invocation won't do help as the operation will continue until completion.
Edit
From this question: ASP.Net: How to stop page execution when browser disconnects?
You could also check the Response.IsClientConnected property to try and determine whether the invocation had been aborted.
Generally speaking, the server isn't going to know that a client has disconnected until it attempts to send data to it. See Best practice to detect a client disconnection in .NET? and Instantly detect client disconnection from server socket.
As nick_w wrote you can't stop the request being processed by the server once it has started. But there is ability to implement solution which will give you ability to cancel server task. Dino Esposito has several great articles about how such things can be implemented:
Canceling Server Tasks with ASP.NET AJAX
And in the following articles to implement pooling to server Dino Esposito describes how to use SignalR library:
Build a Progress Bar with SignalR;
Long Polling and SignalR
So if you really need to cancel some task on server these articles can be used as starting point to implement required solution.

ASP.NET, asynchronous call to another page, return response immediately

The problem is as follows:
An external server sends incoming SMS messages converted to HTTP requests into my sometimes very time-consuming .aspx page. If no response is returned to the external server in 20 seconds, this is considered as an timeout and the same message is sent to my aspx page again (and maybe again....)
The optimal solution for me would be that the aspx page reads the incoming message (as an HTTP request to the aspx page), starts the processing of the message in another thread, and immediately renders response back to the external server. The external server has no interest in other stuff than the HTTP status (normally 200). When the processing of the message is completed this results in an entry into the log file of the application.
The processing of the message is done by making another web request to an aspx page, and I have tried to use the BeginGetResponse method for the web request, and have created a handler for handling of the completed web request to the processing page. The problem is that the handler seems to not be called, most likely because the aspx page's lifecycle is ended before the asynchrounous web request is completed.
Has anyone any good solution for this problem? I have also looked at the async page model, but this also seems to not be a solution for me because the response should be returned to the external server before the processing of the message is completed.
Regards, Eivind
I'd be very wary of using threads in ASP.Net in this manner. Using them to take advantage of multiple cores is one thing. Using them to set up some kind of concurrent response technique seems like a recipe for disaster. Especially when there is a far more elegant solution.
Your ASP.Net application should merely take the message and toss it in a database and send the success reply. It's job is done. The job of delivering the message should be handled by some kind of service or daemon. Windows Services are kind of a pain to build and maintain so perhaps just a scheduled task that runs every 30 seconds or so checking for queued messages in the DB would suit your purposes just fine.
I've seen a lot of people try to use threads in ASP.Net when they really should just be creating a background service. The results are never as reliable as you would hope.
Async page model is definitely not the solution. Have you tried using the unload event to do EndRequest? I really don't know if that would work but it is worth a try. The most robust way is to use Windows Service to run the async request.

Asynchronous web service call in ASP.NET/C#

We have an application that hits a web service successfully, and the data returned updates our DB. What I'm trying to do is allow the user to continue using other parts of our web app while the web service processes their request and returns the necessary data.
Is this asynchronous processing? I've seen some console app samples on the msdn site, but considering this is a web form using a browser I'm not sure those samples apply. What if the user closes the browser window mid request? Currently we're using the Message Queue which "waits" for the web service to respond then handles the DB update, but we'd really like to get rid of that.
I'm (obviously) new to async requests and could use some help figuring this out. Does anyone have some code samples or pertinent articles I could check out?
Yes, what you're describing is async processing.
The best solution depends to some degree on the nature of the web services call and how you want to handle the results. A few tips that might help:
One approach is to send a request from the initial web request to a background thread. This works best if your users don't need to see the results of the call as soon as it completes.
Another approach is to have your server-side code make an async web services call. This is the way to go if your users do need to see the results. The advantage of an async call on the server side is that it doesn't tie up an ASP.NET worker thread waiting for results (which can seriously impair scalability)
Your server-side code can be structured either as a web page (*.aspx) or a WCF service, depending on what you want to have it return. Both forms support async.
From the client, you can use an async XMLHTTP request (Ajax). That way, you will receive a notification event when the call completes.
Another approach for long-running tasks is to write them to a persistent queue using Service Broker. This works best for things that you'd like users to be able to start and then walk away from and see the results later, with an assurance that the task will be completed.
In case it helps, I cover each of these techniques in detail in my book, along with code examples: Ultra-Fast ASP.NET.
If you're not blocking for a method return you're doing asychronous processing. Have a look at Dino Esposito's article on using AJAX for server task checking.
You can perform asynchronous web service calls using both Web Service Enhancements (WSE) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in your C# code. WSE is discontinued, so its use is not recommended. Generically speaking, if you were to terminate program execution in the middle of an asynchronous call before the response returned, nothing bad would happen; the client would simply not process the result, but the web service would still be able to perform its processing to completion.
If your client web application is responsible for updating the DB, then without anything else in your client code, quitting in the middle of an asynchronous operation would mean that the DB was not updated. However, you could add some code to your client application that prevented the browser from quitting entirely while it is waiting for an asynchronous response while preventing new web service calls from being run after Close is called (using Javascript).
You have 2 distinct communications here: (1) from web browser to web application and (2) from web application to web service.
diagram http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/6713/diagramo.png
There is no point of making (2) asynchronous: you still would have to wait for web service to finish processing request. If you end HTTP request from browser to web application the client would have no clue what the result of request was.
It is much better to make asynchronous request from web browser to your web application. Ajax is ideal for that. In fact, that's what it was created for. Here's couple of links to get you started:
jQuery Ajax
ASP.NET AJAX

best way to consume a webservice in an asp.net code behind

I'm trying to bind a datasource to a repeater, for instance, to a web service (.asmx from a different website) on page load. The webservice returns a DataSet from an sql call. What is the best way to go about doing this?
Because you're calling another website, you have to contend with two issues (especially if this web service is on somebody else's website or over the public internet). First, there might be a delay to retrieve the data from the other website. Second, the other website might timeout.
At a minimum you should consider an asychronous page request. As this MSDN article states:
If a synchronous request becomes I/O
bound—for example, if it calls out to
a remote Web service or queries a
remote database and waits for the call
to come back—then the thread assigned
to the request is stuck doing nothing
until the call returns. That impedes
scalability because the thread pool
has a finite number of threads
available. If all request-processing
threads are blocked waiting for I/O
operations to complete, additional
requests get queued up waiting for
threads to be free. At best,
throughput decreases because requests
wait longer to be processed. At worst,
the queue fills up and ASP.NET fails
subsequent requests with 503 "Server
Unavailable" errors.
But the best solution is probably to use AJAX. Load the page then make an ajax request to fill the repeater. That way you can have the nice "spinning" graphic or something else happening while you are waiting on the webservice.
Call the webservice, take the result, and bind it to your repeater.
If you can, you might also try to cache the information for a time on your side, if possible to help with overall performance.

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