从WCF服务调用方法异步并立即返回

Question

A third party is calling our WCF service. The caller wants confirmation, that the sent records have been received and stored, within a small timeframe.

The records that are stored need some lenghty processing. Can the processing be executed async, right after storing the records, so the confirmation can be send immediately?

Ofcourse there can be a separate process that does the processing, but the question is whether I can combine storage and processing without timing out.

Update:
It looks like this works:

var aTask = new Task(myService.TheMethod);
aTask.Start();

return aVariableAsync;

Or is this a very bad idea to do from within my WCF host, because.. ?

Answer 1

You can set "AsyncPattern" to true on the OperationContract attribute as described on MSDN .

You can then control the concurrency using the following attribute on the service method:

[ServiceBehavior(ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)]

Answer 2

Yes it can be done. I dont have a ton of experience with it, but this is a snippet of some code showing that. The service calls this method on the controller that saves an xml message to the hard drive and then kicks off a separate task to process it into MongoDB and returns a message back to the service that it was successfully saved.

    public string SaveTransaction(XElement pTransactionXml, string pSavePath)
    {

        //save the transaction to the drive locally
        pTransactionXml.Save(pSavePath);

        ...

        var mongoTask = Task.Run(async () =>
        {
            await SendXMLFilesToMongo(pSavePath);
        });

        return response.WithResult("Successfully saved to disk.");
    }



    public virtual async Task<int> SendXMLFilesToMongo(string pSavePath)
    {
         //call the code to save to mongo and do additional processing
    }