Handling long running webrequest

Question

I have a web request that can take 30-90 seconds to complete in some cases(most of the time it completed in 2-3). Currently, the software looks like it has hung if the request takes this long.

I was thinking that I could use background worker to process the webrequest in a separate thread. However, The software must wait on the request to process before continuing. I know how to setup the background worker. What I am unsure about is how to handle waiting on the request to process.

Do I need to create a timer to check for the results until the request times out or is processed?

Answer 1

I wouldn't use a timer. Rather, when the web request completes on the worker thread, use a call to the Invoke method on a control in the UI to update the UI with the result (or send some sort of notification).