CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#wcf
Jeffnl
Jeffnl

Reputation: 261

Communication WCF constant connection

When using WCF for 2 computer to communicate over the network, i am executing a method on the remote server, the time the operation can take is not known it can take from 1 second to a day or more, so i want to set the ((IClientChannel)pipeProxy).OperationTimeout property to a high value, but is this the way to go or is this a dirty way of programming, because a connection is active for the whole time (it is all on a relatively stable lan network).

Upvotes: 0

Views: 161

Answers (1)

Matthew Watson
Matthew Watson

Reputation: 109567

I wouldn't do it like that. Such a long timeout is likely to cause issues.

I would split the operation into two: One call from client to server which starts the operation, and then a callback from the server to the client to say that it's finished. The callback would of course include any result information (success, failure etc).

For something which takes such a long time, you might also want to introduce a "keep alive" mechanism where the client periodically calls the server to check that it is still responding.

If you have a very long timeout, it makes it hard to know if something has actually gone wrong. But if you split the operation into two, it makes it impossible to know if something has gone wrong unless you poll occasionally with a keep-alive (or more accurately, "are you alive?") style message.

Alternatively, you could have the server call back occasionally with a progress message, but that's a bit harder to manage than having the client polling the server occasionally (because the client would have to track the last time the server called it back to determine if the server had stopped responding).

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions