Queue-Based Background Processing in ASP.NET MVC Web Application [closed]

Answer 1

Jeff has a great post showing how he achieved this originally for Stack Overflow at http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/easy-background-tasks-in-aspnet/

While it might not be as reliable as a service if that's an option to you, it's served me well in the past for non essential tasks, and I've had it working in a virtual hosting environment.

Answer 2

Just found this question when searching for background process in ASP.NET MVC. (Available after .NET 4.5.2)

public ActionResult InitiateLongRunningProcess(Emails emails)
{
    if (ModelState.IsValid)
    {
       HostingEnvironment.QueueBackgroundWorkItem(ct => LongRunningProcessAsync(emails.Email));
       return RedirectToAction("Index", "Home");
    }

    return View(user);
}

Note: Personally I won't use the Webserver to run background tasks. Also don't reinvent the wheel, I would highly recommend to use Hangfire.

Read this great article from Hanselman HowToRunBackgroundTasksInASPNET

Answer 3

Windows Services and MSMQ to communicate with them (if you even need to).

-- Edit

To slightly expand.

You'll create several services, depending on what you want to do, and have them all run an endless thread of various sleeping levels, to do what you want. They will then update the database appropriately, and you will not have had to do anything on the client side.

You may wish to interact with them from an admin point of view, hence you may have an MSMQ that they listen to admin commands on. Depending on your implementation, you may need to restart them for some reason, or possibly just 'force' a running of whatever they wish to do.

So you'll use an MSMQ Private Queue to do it (System.Messaging namespace). One of the main things to note about MSMQ, is that message need to be < 4meg. So if you intend to send large object graphs, serialise to a file first and just send the filename.

MSMQ is quite beautiful. You can send based on a 'Correlation ID' if you need to, but, for some amusing reason, the correlation ID must be in the form of:

{guid}\1

Anything else does not work (at least in version 2.0 of the framework, the code may have changed).

-- Edit

Example, as requested:

using System.Messaging;

...


MessageQueue queue = new MessageQueue(".\\Private$\\yourqueue");
queue.Formatter = new BinaryMessageFormatter();

Message m = new Message();
m.Body = "your serialisable object or just plain string";

queue.Send(m);


// on the other side

MessageQueue queue = new MessageQueue(".\\Private$\\yourqueue");
queue.Formatter = new BinaryMessageFormatter();

Message m = queue.Receive();

string s = m.Body as string;

// s contains that string now