Keeping a page from timing out when waiting for a long running process

[Steve W]

Is it possible to keep some communication going between the browser and web
server going while waiting for a long running process to finish ?

We have one function on our app (ASP.NET / VB.NET) that does a long running
update to the database (takes upto 10 mins) and the browser will often time
out before it completes.

Ideally I'd like to send information back to the browser from the process,
but anything that stops the browser timing out would be good.

Thanks

Steve

 

[bruce barker]

while you can turn buffering off, and send patial results, 10 minutes is a
long time. proxy servers may disconnect, etc. you should switch to running
the function with a background thread, and have the page poll for results.
google this newgroup for progress bars

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

| Is it possible to keep some communication going between the browser and
web
| server going while waiting for a long running process to finish ?
|
| We have one function on our app (ASP.NET / VB.NET) that does a long
running
| update to the database (takes upto 10 mins) and the browser will often
time
| out before it completes.
|
| Ideally I'd like to send information back to the browser from the process,
| but anything that stops the browser timing out would be good.
|
| Thanks
|
| Steve
|
|

 

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Thanks for Bruce's informative inputs.

Hi Steve,

As Bruce have mentioned, the general meams is to let the long run task
running at serverside( in a background thread ..) and the page response
return as normal. Then, we contantly post back to poll the result from
serverside. And here are some tech article discussing on such topic:

#How to show progress in the client browser for a long-running ASP.NET page
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=837375

#DESIGN PATTERNS: Asynchronous Wait State Pattern in ASP.NET
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/12/designpatterns/default...
http://www.aspnetpro.com/NewsletterArticle/2003/08/asp200308bm_l/asp2...
_l.asp

Hope also helps.

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

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