CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wcfwindows-phone-7long-polling
Morti
Morti

Reputation: 717

Long polling Windows Phone, 60 seconds TimeOut


Hello
A Windows Phone application need to connect to a server and get messages from it. This is done using WCF and long polling on the server. 3 minutes is the timeout defined on the server. Call from windows phone is done using HttpWebRequest.
The problem is that Windows Phone devices have a timeout of 60 seconds for get request (emulator have a different value, greater than 3 minutes).
Currently i can't decrease server timeout. Doing a new GetRequest after the 60 seconds doesn't get anymore messages.
Does anyone have an idea ?
Thanks

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1068

Answers (1)

Doguhan Uluca
Doguhan Uluca

Reputation: 7323

I don't think leaving a connection open is a good idea on mobile devices. I'm assuming that's what you're doing. In my app, I would just poll whenever needed by creating a new HttpWebRequest. But it made sense to do this in my app, because I would be updating train arrival status every 40 seconds.

If you're trying to pull data on a given schedule, put a timer in and just call the webserver every 3 minutes or whatever the requirement is.

If you want to be able to check things (when the app is closed) or if there's rarely fresh data on the server, then you'd need to implement a Push mechanism.

Update: Here's a good article on dealing with the timeout issue - http://blog.xyzzer.me/2011/03/10/real-time-client-server-communication-on-windows-phone-with-long-polling/

Update 2: What if you arranged it so that, you have cascading connections - what I mean is since you can't go beyond 60 seconds per connection, you can write a class that'll house two connections and once one of them is about to timeout, say several seconds before, you can start opening the other connection - you can pick the timing so that there's at most 5 seconds of overlap between them. This way you could have your always open connection.

Also see what these guys have done with the GChat app, they have their source code available at this link. This may provide a more proper design.

Upvotes: 3

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