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WCF REST - Is it possible to return response without ending the execution?

As you'll most likely figure it out, I'm not very experienced with async operations in general (only used Android's AsyncTask).
This is the outline of a WCF REST POST method; I'll use this image to hopefully explain what I'm trying to achieve.
The FirstJob saves some stuff to the database.
SecondJob reads what was saved in the database and does some work with the data.
The client does not care about what happens in SecondJob and just wants to receive the response from FirstJob.
So the two jobs don't need to run in parallel as SecondJob depends on FirstJob; the SecondJob would ideally run in a separate thread/context(?) or similar.
From what I've noticed, the second job does start in a separate thread, the execution reaches the return statement while the 2nd job is running, but the request does not end until SecondJob finishes.

I'd personally treat the second job as a separate POST operation and call the second job POST from the controller. The controller is the controller for the first job and can return the correct status from the first job; it just happens to call a POST out to a second endpoint while doing it.
The benefit of this approach is that the second job doesn't even need to be on the same IIS (in an NLB farm it could be anywhere) so you get load balancing thrown in for free. Alternatively the "second job server" can be on a specific URL reserved just for this kind of background processing task.

I suggest you not to rely on the IIS to handle your background task as it can shut down it without waiting. I suggest you to create a windows service application, which will accept the requests for a second jobs, via another WCF binding or database requests or something else.
You can get the results of the second jobs with another request from your controller, as #PhillipH stated.

The thing I was trying to do was actually working in the first place, but the visual studio debugger fooled me. I tested again without the debugger, but with a Tread.Sleep(60000) and it looks like it behaves as expected. The SecondJob keeps running in the background after the api call returned the response.

Trying to use asp.net async page

I have an ASP.NET (webforms) page that needs to call a stored procedure which may take up to a minute to return. I realise that this is not ideal but the the database side of this project is out of my hands and hence I must live with this problem.
Basically I am looking for some method which will allow the page to render without the stored procedure hanging the page - with the results from the database call being displayed when available.
So, I am looking at an async page. I have added "ASYNC=TRUE" to the top of the page and so far, I have the following:
private async void GetCampaignCounts(int CampaignID)
{
Task t = new Task
(
() =>
{
CampaignService cs = new CampaignService();
FilterSet.TargetCounts f = cs.GetCampaignDetails(CampaignID); //LONG RUNNING DB CALL
if (f.Total > 0)
{
panelStatsLeft.Visible = true;
//DO STUFF IN HERE
}
else
panelStatsLeft.Visible = false;
}
);
t.Start();
await t;
}
However, this still hangs the page whilst the database query is running!
Am I doing something totally wrong?!

The asynchronous requests in web applications are not intended to not hang the page. The request will still take the same time as the synchronous version. The benefits are in scalability (i.e. if your page could handle 100 simultaneous users before it would be able to handle 1000 if it is async on the same hardware assuming that the bottleneck was the request pipeline and not the database).
If you want to make the page load and update itself when the operation completes I am afraid you will need significantly more complex architecture. Your best bet is load the page and do an ajax request that runs the query and update the page when the request returns. It is a best practice to use async/await for this ajax request (again for scalability).

Personally i wouldn't bother tying the two together. A better operation is to offload the query elsewhere and return later to get the results.
So use a signalling framework such as signalr. Submit your report parameters, pass them to msmq where they can be handled on a different server or use a one way wcf request. When the request is received optionally store the result in the database and use signalling to notify client (either passing them the actual result or telling them the url where they can download the report from (pick it up from the database in that other url)). Async that into the users current browser page which presumably has a spinner saying "hey we are generating your report".
Consider signalling too.

As I describe in my MSDN article on the topic, async on ASP.NET is not a silver bullet:
When some developers learn about async and await, they believe it’s a way for the server code to “yield” to the client (for example, the browser). However, async and await on ASP.NET only “yield” to the ASP.NET runtime; the HTTP protocol remains unchanged, and you still have only one response per request. If you needed SignalR or AJAX or UpdatePanel before async/await, you’ll still need SignalR or AJAX or UpdatePanel after async/await.
This makes sense if you think about the HTTP protocol: there can be only one response for each request, and async doesn't change the HTTP protocol (more detail on my blog). So, if you return a response to the client (allowing it to render the page), then that request is done. You can't send a followup response later to change the page you already sent.
The proper solution is fairly complex, because ASP.NET wasn't designed to track "background" operations without a request. ASP.NET will recycle your application periodically, and if there are no active requests, it assumes that it's a good time to do so. So, "background" operations are in danger of being terminated without notice.
For this reason, the best solution is to have an independent worker process that actually executes the background operation using a basic distributed architecture (requests are placed into a reliable queue by the ASP.NET handler; requests will re-enter the queue automatically if the worker process fails). This also means your requests should be idempotent.
If you don't want this level of complexity, you can trade-off reliability for complexity. An intermediate step is Hangfire, which requires a database backend at least (which it uses for reliability instead of a queue). If you want the least reliability (and least complexity), you can just use HostingEnvironment.QueueBackgroundWorkItem or my ASP.NET Background Tasks library. I have a longer overview of these options on my blog.

Run asynchronous operation in one controller method and get that operation's result in another

I have a long running operation you might read in couple of my another questions (for your reference here is first and second).
In the beginning of whole deal, project expose a form in which user should specify all necessary information about XML file and upload XML file itself. In that method all user input data caught and went to an WCF service that handles such king of files. Controller got only task id of such processing.
Then user got redirected to progress bar page and periodically retrieves status of task completeness, refreshes the progress bar.
So here is my issue comes. When processing of XML file if over, how can I get results back and show them to user?
I know that HTTP is stateless protocol but there is cookie mechanism that could help in this situation. Of course, I may just save processing results to some temporary place, like a static class in WCF server, but there is a high load on service, so it will eat all of supplied memory.
In other words, I would like to pass task to WCF service (using netNamedPipeBinding) and receive results back as fast as it really possible. I want to escape temporary saving result to some buffer and wait until client will gather it back.
As far as I go is using temporary buffer not on service side but at client's:
using (XmlProcessingServiceClient client = new XmlProcessingServiceClient())
{
client.AnalyzeXmlAsync(new Task { fileName = filePath, id = tid });
client.AnalyzeXmlCompleted += (sender, e) =>
{
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Application.Lock();
// here is I just use single place for all clients. I know it is not right, it is just for illustrating purposes.
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Application["Result"] = e;
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Application.UnLock();
};
}

I suggest you to use a SignalR hub to address your problem. You have a way to call a method on the client directly to notify the operation completed. And this happen without having to deal with the actual infrastructure trouble there is in implementing such strategies. Plus SignalR plugs easily in an asp.net MVC application.

To be honest I didn't really get the part about the wcf server and stuff, but I think I can give you more of an abstract answer. To be sure:
You have a form with some fields + file upload
The user fills in the form and supplies an XML file
You send the XML file to an WFC services which procress it
Show in the mean time a progress bar which updates
After completion show the results
If this is not want you want or this is not what your question is about you can skip my answer, otherwise read on.
Before we begin: Step 3 is a bit ambiguous: It could mean that we send the data to the service and wait for it to return the result or that we send the data to the service and we don´t wait for it to return the result.
Situation 1:
Create in a view the form with all the required fields
Create an action in your controller which handles the postback.
The action will send the data to the service and when the service returns the result, your action will render a view with the result.
On the submit button you add an javascript on click event. This will trigger an ajax call to some server side code which will return the progress.
The javascript shows some sort of status bar with the correct progress and repeats itself every x seconds
When the controller finishes it will show the result
Situation 2:
-
-
After sending the data to the service the controller shows a view with the progress bar.
We add an javascript event on document ready which checks the status of the xml file and updates a progressbar. (same as the onclick event in step 4 in situation 1)
When the progressbar reaches 100% it will redirect to a different page which shows the results
Does this answer your question?
Best regards,
BHD

netNamedPipeBinding will not work for cross-machine communication if this is what you have in mind.
If you want to host our service on IIS then you will need one of the bindings that use HTTP as their transport protocol. Have a look at the duplex services that allow both endpoints to send messages. This way the server can send messages to the client anytime it wishes to. You could created a callback interface for progress reporting. If the task is going to take a considerable amount of time to complete, then the overhead of the progress reporting through HTTP might be ok.
Also have a look at Building and Accessing Duplex Services if you want to use a duplex communication over HTTP with Silverlight (PollingDuplexHttpBinding).
Finally you could look for a Comet implementation for ASP.NET. In CodeProject you will at least a couple (CometAsync and PokeIn).

I'm not sure if this is the best solution but I was able to do something similar. This was the general setup:
Controller A initialized a new class with the parameters for the action to be performed and passed the user's session object
The new class called a method in a background thread which updated the user's session as it progressed
Controller B had json methods that when called by client side javascript, checked the user's session data and returned the latest progress.
This thread states that using the session object in such a way is bad but I'm sure you can do something similar with a thread safe storage method like sql or a temp file.

Waiting for asynchronous result in a different controller method than the one that starts it

How would one go about waiting for an asynchronous result in a controller method? It seems like it would be trivial to implement, but so far I have not found a good example that is clean and elegant.
Here is the problem. I have two controller methods. Method A and Method B. Method A starts a long running process via TaskFactory, and uses ContinueWith to update a cached value when the process is finished. There are some intermediate steps between A and B. Now when I get to Method B, I need to check the value in the cache. If the value in the cache has not been updated yet, I need to wait for x amount of seconds and periodically check to see if the value has been updated.
I would prefer to handle all of this in the controller, so the client doesn't have to poll for the result (and having to rewrite the controller to handle the polling). But I haven't been able to figure out a way to implement the polling inside the controller method that doesn't block until the timeout expires(I'm worried about thread pool starvation). Maybe there isn't a clean implementation that I can use here. And if polling is the right or only answer, I will just have to accept it.

HTTP is a stateless protocol. You can't implement such polling on the server without blocking. You have 2 possibilities:
Polling on the client - have the client hammer your server at regular intervals with AJAX requests
Use push and have the server notify the client(s) when some task completes - checkout SignalR

You can wait for mvc 4 to get async controllers or get beta of mvc 4 and .net 4.5.

WCF Rest Asynchronous Calling Methods

I have a class library I developed that is rather processing intensive that I currently call through a WCF REST service.
The REST service directly accesses the DLLs for the class library and more or less the WCF rest service is an interface for the system.
Let's say the following methods are defined:
Create Request
Starts a thread that takes five minutes, but immediately returns a session ID that the process generates and the thread uses to report when it is completed to the database.
Check Status
Accepts a session id and checks the database to see if the process has completed.
I have to think that there is a better way to "manage" the threads running, however, my requirements state that the user should receive an immediate response from the REST service upon issuing a request.
I am using the WCF Message property to return XML to the browser and as this application can be called from any programming language I can't use classic WCF and callbacks (I think, correct me if I am wrong).
Sometimes I run into an issue where an error occurs and the iscomplete event never gets written to the database and therefore the "Check Status" method says it's processing forever.
Does anyone have any ideas about what is normally done and what can be done in this situation?
Thanks!
Jeffrey Kevin Pry

Your service should return a 202 Accepted at the initial request with a way for the client to check the current status, either through the Location header or as part of the content.
As you indicate the client then polls the URL indicated to check the current status. I would also suggest adding a bit of cache time to this response in case a client just starts looping.
How you handle things on the server is up to you and in no way related to REST. For one thing I would put all logic that executes as the background thread in a try/catch to you can return an error status back if an error occurs and possibly retry the action depending on the circumstances.

I implemented a similiar process for importing/processing of large files and to be honest, I have never had a problem. Perhaps resolving the reason that the IsComplete never gets set will make this more resilient.
Not much of an answer, but still..