what is the difference of calling a Web Services using Asynchronous Call vs. Asynchronous Task

Question

What is the difference between Web Services Asynchronous Call and Asynchronous Task's.

We are working an a ASP.NET application that requires to make a call to a Web Service Method that will process thousand rows of data. This process usually takes between 2 to 3 minutes (maybe more maybe less it depends of the amount of Data). So we run all the time in Timeout's on that specific page.

So we decided to go in rout of calling this Web Service Method Asynchronously, but we had a conflict caused by HTTP handler of one of the UI component's that we are using. Well lucky on that case we could remove the page from the httphandler directives.

So far no issues, but here it comes the question, a coworker find out that we can use instead of Asynchronous Webs Services Call, wrap a Synchronous call in a Asynchronous Task in the ASP.NET page and be able to keep the directives to the component, and execute the Web Service Method with out getting a Timeout.

So now my concern is what kind of issues we can find using Asynchronous Task's instead of an Asynchronous Call.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

If I understand your scenario, there should be no issues. In both cases, your page is asynchronous. In both cases, you don't wait for the service to complete - you give up the request thread while the service is running. In both cases, your page takes the same amount of time to execute as it would if you had called the service synchronously.

Answer 2

Web services should not be used in this manner by the way. There's a reason HTTP timeouts are so low. You should have the Web service trigger the task either by setting a flag in the DB that an actual service picks up on or the web service should spawn a process.