How to call an external program in ASP.NET such that each visitor gets isolated?

Question

Dear all,

Actually I don't know whether my question is related to this thread.

I want to create a web application using ASP.NET MVC 2.

For simplicity, let my scenario be as follows:

A visitor is allowed to submit a text file and get a pdf output from the server.

There is an Adobe-Acrobat-like application, that can convert text to pdf, running on my server.

My question is how to execute the converter such that each visitor submitting files cannot interfere with others?

Should I make an instance of the converter for each visitor?

Thank you in advance.

regards, yoyo

Answer 1

Well, that all depends on the capabilities of your converter component and its API. How do you inoke the conversion process? Is it a .NET assembly or some external process you are communicating with?

ASP.NET can help you as it contains the following concepts:

• Each request is executed in a seperate thread with its own context
• You can use sessions to associate multiple requests with the user that originated them

Answer 2

It depends upon your requirements, whether you want to execute it synchronously or async way. If its synchronous process then ASP.Net executes each request in a separate thread so you dont have to worry.So it will not interfere with others. If its async process then you may want to write windows service which will run in backgound to execute each request of the user.