Stop processing Flask route if request aborted

Question

I have a flask REST endpoint that does some cpu-intensive image processing and takes a few seconds to return. Often, this endpoint gets called, then aborted by the client. I

Answer 1

As far as I know you can't know if a connection was closed by the client during the execution because the server is not testing if the connection is open during the execution. I know that you can create your custom request_handler in your Flask application for detecting if after the request is processed the connection was "dropped".

For example:

from flask import Flask
from time import sleep
from werkzeug.serving import WSGIRequestHandler


app = Flask(__name__)


class CustomRequestHandler(WSGIRequestHandler):

    def connection_dropped(self, error, environ=None):
        print 'dropped, but it is called at the end of the execution :('


@app.route("/")
def hello():
    for i in xrange(3):
        print i
        sleep(1)
    return "Hello World!"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True, request_handler=CustomRequestHandler) 

Maybe you want to investigate a bit more and as your custom request_handler is created when a request comes you can create a thread in the __init__ that checks the status of the connection every second and when it detects that the connection is closed ( check this thread ) then stop the image processing. But I think this is a bit complicated :(.