CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#asp.netmultithreading
Biff MaGriff
Biff MaGriff

Reputation: 8231

How do I manage threads in a C# web app?

I built a little web application that displays charts. I was thinking that it might be useful for the superuser of the app to do a complete data refresh, however this process takes around 10 minutes to complete. I was thinking perhaps the user could click a button that would start off a new thread to do a data refresh and subsequent clicks would kill the thread and restart the data population process. The user would then be free to browse about the site and view the charts as their data is populated.

Is there a simple method of accomplishing something like this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 602

Answers (3)

Biff MaGriff
Biff MaGriff

Reputation: 8231

Ok, I didn't use either answer so here is what I did. I decided that it would be better if subsequent clicks would terminate instead of the currently executing one. Thanks for your answers guys.

//code behind
protected void butRefreshData_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Thread t = new Thread(new ThreadStart(DataRepopulater.DataRepopulater.RepopulateDatabase));
    t.Start();       
}

//DataRepopulater.cs
namespace DataRepopulater
{
    public static class DataRepopulater
    {
    private static string myLock = "My Lock";
    public static void RepopulateDatabase()
    {
        if(Monitor.TryEnter(myLock))
        {
            DoWork();
            Monitor.Exit(myLock);
        }
    }
}

Upvotes: 1

jbehren
jbehren

Reputation: 770

Other options include: Handing the intense processing off to a database server (sounds like this might be a good use of OLAP) or, another cheap trick might be to set up the click to fire off a scheduled task that runs on the server. Can you provide some additional detail about the environment? Single server? Data storage platform, version of .net?

Upvotes: 1

John Fisher
John Fisher

Reputation: 22719

You can twist ASP.NET to do this sort of thing, but it violates a few good general rules for ASP.NET development -- and could really cause problems in a server farm.

So, the most obvious route is to do this work in a web service. You can have the method return a chunk of HTML if you want. You could also add status methods to see how the thread is progressing.

Upvotes: 1

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