I have an ASP (MVC2) application that is calling a WCF Service. The service is going to take a long time, so I don't want the client ASP application to wait for it to finish. It records its status in the database, and that is available to the ASP client.
I am calling the service asynchronously, but my ASP application still hangs when it trys to transition to the next page. I suspect it is because of the thread hanging waiting for the service to reply.
What is the best way to implement this interface so that the ASP application can continue and not be blocked?
If you don't want to know result of web service call you don't need asynchronous call. You need one way (also known as fire and forget) call. Add IsOneWay=true to your OperationContract like:
[ServiceContract]
public interface MyServiceContract
{
[OperationContract(IsOneWay=true)]
void MyOperation(Data data);
}
One way operation must return void. Client will only wait to estabilish connection and send data. It will not wait for end of processing.
Related
The Problem is when i am calling wcf webservice from asp.net Web Application UI hangs til webservice finishes it processing and connection to service get closed.
The problems comes in very badly when i am calling webservice using AJAX, Complete UI Hangs till service connection get close.
If you could give me any clue?
The UI thread is on hold until the service call completes.
You need to call the service asynchronously - or if it's likely that the client will have 'moved on' from the page before the service call completes, make the WCF call One Way - in this case the service response happens instantly, the UI thread continues and the WCF service processes the request on it's own thread. Obviously there is no completion response from a one way call.
I have an ASP.NET Webform which currently calls a Java WebService. The ASP.NET Webform is created/maintained inhouse, whereas the Java WS is a package solution where we only have a WS interface to the application.
The problem is, that the Java WS is sometimes slow to respond due to system load etc. and there is nothing I can do about this. So currently at the moment there is a long delay on the ASP.NET Webform sometimes if the Java-WS is slow to respond, sometimes causing ASP.NET to reach its timeout value and throw the connection.
I need to ensure data connectivity between these two applications, which I can do by increasing the timeout value, but I cannot have the ASP.NET form wait longer than a couple of seconds.
This is where the idea of a queuing system comes into place.
My idea is, to have the ASP.NET form build the soap request and then queue it in a local queue, where then a Daemon runs and fires off the requests at the Java-WS.
Before I start building something from scratch I need a couple of pointers.
Is my solution viable ?
Are there any libraries etc already out there that I can achieve this functionality with ?
Is there a better way of achieving what i am looking for ?
You can create a WindowsService hosting a WCF service.
Your web app can them call the WCF methods of your Windows Service.
Your windows service can call the java web service methods asynchronously, using the
begin/End pattern
Your windows service can even store the answers of the java web service, and expose them through another WCF methods. For example you could have this methods in your WCF service:
1) a method that allows to call inderectly a java web service and returnd an identifier for this call
2) another method that returns the java web service call result by presenting the identifier of the call
You can even use AJAX to call the WCF methods of your Windows Service.
You have two separate problems:
Your web form needs to learn to send a request to a service and later poll to get the results of that service. You can do this by writing a simple intermediate service (in WCF, please) which would have two operations: one to call the Java service asynchronously, and the other to find out whether the async call has completed, and return the results if it has.
You may need to persistently queue up requests to the Java service. The easiest way to do this, if performance isn't a top concern (and it seems not to be), is to break the intermediate service in #1 into two: one half calls the other half using a WCF MSMQ binding. This will transparently use MSMQ as a transport, causing queued requests to stay in the queue until they are pulled out by the second half. The second half would be written as a Windows service so that it comes up on system boot and starts emptying the queue.
you could use MSMQ for queuing up the requests from you client.
Bear in mind that MSMQ doesn't handle anything for you - it's just a transport.
All it does is take MSMQ messages and deliver them to MSMQ queues.
The creation of the original messages and the processing of the delivered messages is all handled in your own code on the sending and receiving machines: the destination machine would have to have MSMQ installed plus a custom service running to pick them up and process them
Anyway there is a librays for interop with MSQM using JAVA : http://msmqjava.codeplex.com/
Another way could be you can create a queue on one of your windows box and then create a service that pick up the messages form the Queue and foreward them to the Java service
We are making a web service call on some data updates to sync another database. This web service call takes up some response time. Would adding it in a thread help at all? Any downfalls of doing this? If the web service calls fails, it fails and that is it. It is like a fire and forget call.
You could use an Asynchronous Web Service call using asyncronous callbacks to prevent blocking of your main thread.
By making an asynchronous call to a Web service, you can continue to
use the calling thread while you wait for the Web service to respond.
This means users can continue to interact with your application
without it locking up while the Web service access proceeds.
From MSDN: Making Asynchronous Web Service Calls
If it's taking long enough to hang the user interface then calling it on another thread is the recommended thing to do.
In addition to Tudor's answer I would suggest that you start off by using the new Task class from .NET 4.0.from task parallel library. Example would be:
Task backgroundProcess = new Task(() =>
{
service.CallMethod();
});
I strongly advice against using Async Web Service calls (including making calls in separate threads) from a web app. Instead use alternate approach like Ajax, and make this webservice call from an Ajax Call instance. There is no easy approach in the web context to handle threading and Async calls.
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.
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