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Background processing in ASP.NET

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As part of my bicycle climbs website, I need to spend some time calling a web service to fetch the elevation of 250 different points. Each call takes a few seconds.

Ideally, what I would have is a way to start the processing but not have it block my normal page processing operation.

Ideas? I looked at the MSDN docs here, but that requires me to continually refresh the page. I could do that if necessary if there's no other way.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2005
    http://www.asp.net/default.aspx?tabindex=9&tabid=47

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/06/Threading/

    http://www.stardeveloper.com/articles/display.html?article=2001121901&page=1
  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2005
    AJAX?

    This sounds like the perfect use for it.

    You could even use MS's Atlas framework.
  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2005
    I'm not sure I completely understand your problem, but there's no reason you couldn't start a worker thread for this purpose. If it's a one-time event you could stick it in Application_Start.
  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2005
    If you want users to be able to view and use a page while the elevation data is being loaded, the best approach is AJAX and if possible MS Atlas Framework.
  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2005
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/01/ASPNETPerformance/

    I hope this helps you out Eric, this is an older article but Tip Number 6 how to do Background Processing in asp.net I think should fit the bill.
  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2005
    How often do the elevations change? :)

    Why don't you parse the data into a format most useful for your application, and hard code it? You probably want to write a tool to converts the real underlying data to your special format, but there is no need for the site to be truly dynamic.

    That's the approach I took for my Commute Times survey: http://www.leeholmes.com/projects/commute
  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2005
    Lee,

    The user draws a path on the map, and I fetch the elevations from the USGS web service based on that path.

    I'd looked at getting my own copy of the elevation data. I might be able to do it if I was only concerned about Washington, but at the level of resolution I want, the Puget Sound area by itself is well over a Gig of data, and I'd like to cover the whole US, so it just isn't practical.
  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Aren't you looking for this? http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpag/html/PAIBlock.asp
  • Anonymous
    December 08, 2005
    Eric - I'd be interested to know what approach you finally ended up implementing.