How to handle long running operation in Sitecore website?

Question

I've a Sitecore website, where I created a webform on the website root ( DataImport.aspx ), which imports data from Wordpress to Sitecore . On this page I wrote the code to get blog posts from Wordpress , then for each post create a Sitecore Item & download all media to the /uploads folder.

This task takes several minutes to complete (around 10-15 minutes) as we are downloading a large number of media files & I'm getting "Request Timeout" error on browser.

After doing research I found that if we update the executionTimeout setting in web.config it will work fine, but even after updating this to 6000 seconds I'm still getting the same error.

Another thing I would like to ask is what is the best approach when we are doing such tasks? Like, should I create a background process or create a web service?

Answer 1

You should use a Sitecore Job to take care of your long running operations, which will run as a background task, be non-UI blocking and allow you to give feedback to the user. You can even run them as a scheduled task.

Some reference articles:

• Using Sitecore Jobs
• Long Running Process Options
• Use the Sitecore jobs
• Sitecore: Ideal way to execute long running job

Answer 2

Setting executionTimeout is the correct approach. If you set this high enough, your process will continue running. What you are seeing might be your browser giving up - however your process will continue executing in the background until terminated. If you do any logging as part of your job, you will see the logfiles getting updated.