Offline Processing of POST Request

Question

I am developing an Application where I am submitting POST Requests to a .NET Web Service.

Current implementation is to process the request instantly and give response. In actual deployment, there will be huge amount of data that needs to be processed and thus the request must be processed offline.

What are the strategies that can have the task accomplished

Should I implement a Windows Service, or a scheduled task that invokes an application to perform the desired task.

Answer 1

This might be a good case for MSMQ. Your webservice can fill the queue with incoming data, and another process can read those messages and perform the necessary processing.

Here's a good overview of MSMQ:

http://www.primaryobjects.com/CMS/Article77.aspx

Answer 2

If you have so much data it cannot be processed in real-time, I would probably setup the service to do the following:

ProcessRecordViaPost

1. Create new record in "Queue" database with UniqueID, and all other info to be processed
2. Return UniqueID to client immediatly

ReadRecordViaGet

1. Check queue, if processed return data if not return status code (number of items in queue before it?)

I would also have a windows service that continually grabs the oldest item from the Queue, and processes it and moves on to the next oldest.