SYNCRHONOUS WebServices AND Modal Dialogs!

Question

Hi again, the question is....

The application maybe in Silverligth.

It's possible to implement SYNChonous WebService call?

I try to realize any application RIA, with Grids, Edits and using WebServices in SL, but I do not understand how to make it's possible without a SYNC calls.

And I also need to use MODAL DIALOGS for some tasks.

I investigated the work of Daniel Vaughan who manages to run Web service calls synchronously, within a ThreadPool, but How I can do that GUI, wait for calls to webservices?

Daniel Vaughan Web: http://danielvaughan.orpius.com/post/Synchronous-Web-Service-Calls-with-Silverlight-2.aspx

Combining these basic things for other languages, IMHO is possible to build true application.

Hear suggestions...

Cheva.

Answer 1

Its best to analyse the actual objective which, since you want to do this in the GUI, is to prevent user activity until approriate resources have been fetched or processed.

One way to acheive that goal would be to have a synchronous call but the would just lock the UI up in a user unfriendly way. What we realy want is to lock the UI up but in an informative way. In fact we want the UI thread free to display such "Please wait I'm busy processing your request" preferable in a rich UI manner (some animation or progress going on).

To that you can use the BusyIndicator control (inside which you place all or just part of your current UI). You'll find the BusyIndicator in the Silverligt Toolkit. If you are using VS2010 and Silverlight 4 a Similar control is now part of the Ria Services SDK and can is called Activity.

Now when you want to do something "synchronous" you set the BusyIndicator.IsBusy property to true (in SL4 you set the Activity.IsActive to true). Then make a asynchronous request, on completion of the request you set the property to false.

Answer 2

For better or for worse, Silverlight doesn't support synchronous calls to web services. Your best bet is to go with something similar to what Anthony proposed in order to get the desired end result in your UI without actually locking up the UI thread.