I want to be able to call an HTTP endpoint (that I own) from an Azure Function at the end of the Azure Function request.
I do not need to know the result of the request
If there is a problem in the HTTP endpoint that is called I will log it there
I do not want to hold up the return to the client calling the initial Azure Function
Offloading the call of the secondary WebApi onto a background job queue is considered overkill for this requirement
Do I simply call HttpClient.PutAsync without an await?
I realise that the dependencies I have used up until the point that the call is made may well not be available when the call returns. Is there a safe way to check if they are?
My answer may cause some controversy but, you can always start a background task and execute it that way.
For anyone reading this answer, this is far from recommended. The OP has been very clear that they don't care about exceptions or understanding what sort of result the request is returning ...
Task.Run(async () =>
{
using (var httpClient = new HttpClient())
{
await httpClient.PutAsync(...);
}
});
If you want to ensure that the call has fired, it may be worth waiting for a second or two after the call is made to ensure it's actually on it's way.
await Task.Delay(1000);
If you're worried about dependencies in the call, be sure to construct your payload (i.e. serialise it, etc.) external to the Task.Run, basically, minimise any work the background task does.
I am currently working on performance improvements for a React-based SPA. Most of the more basic stuff is already done so I started looking into more advanced stuff such as service workers.
The app makes quite a lot of requests on each page (most of the calls are not to REST endpoints but to an endpoint that basically makes different SQL queries to the database, hence the amount of calls). The data in the DB is not updated too often so we have a local cache for the responses, but it's obviously getting lost when a user refreshes a page. This is where I wanted to use the service worker - to keep the responses either in cache store or in IndexedDB (I went with the second option). And, of course, the cache-first approach does not fit here too well as there is still a chance that the data may become stale. So I tried to implement the stale-while-revalidate strategy: fetch the data once, then if the response for a given request is already in cache, return it, but make a real request and update the cache just in case.
I tried the approach from Jake Archibald's offline cookbook but it seems like the app is still waiting for real requests to resolve even when there is a cache entry to return from (I see those responses in Network tab).
Basically the sequence seems to be the following: request > cache entry found! > need to update the cache > only then show the data. Doing the update immediately is unnecessary in my case so I was wondering if there is any way to delay that? Or, alternatively, not to wait for the "real" response to be resolved?
Here's the code that I currently have (serializeRequest, cachePut and cacheMatch are helper functions that I have to communicate with IndexedDB):
self.addEventListener('fetch', (event) => {
// some checks to get out of the event handler if certain conditions don't match...
event.respondWith(
serializeRequest(request).then((serializedRequest) => {
return cacheMatch(serializedRequest, db.post_cache).then((response) => {
const fetchPromise = fetch(request).then((networkResponse) => {
cachePut(serializedRequest, response.clone(), db.post_cache);
return networkResponse;
});
return response || fetchPromise;
});
})
);
})
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: Can this be due to the fact that I put stuff into IndexedDB instead of cache? I am sort of forced to use IndexedDB instead of the cache because those "magic endpoints" are POST instead of GET (because of the fact they require the body) and POST cannot be inserted into the cache...
Today, I had to restart my browser due to some issue with an extension. What I found when I restarted it, was that my browser (Chromium) automatically updated to a new version that doesn't allow synchronous AJAX-requests anymore. Quote:
Synchronous XMLHttpRequest on the main thread is deprecated because of
its detrimental effects to the end user's experience. For more help,
check http://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/.
I need synchronous AJAX-requests for my node.js applications to work though, as they store and load data from disk through a server utilizing fopen. I found this to be a very simplistic and effective way of doing things, very handy in the creation of little hobby projects and editors... Is there a way to re-enable synchronous XMLHttpRequests in Chrome/Chromium?
This answer has been edited.
Short answer:
They don't want sync on the main thread.
The solution is simple for new browsers that support threads/web workers:
var foo = new Worker("scriptWithSyncRequests.js")
Neither DOM nor global vairables aren't going to be visible within a worker but encapsulation of multiple synchronous requests is going to be really easy.
Alternative solution is to switch to async but to use browser localStorage along with JSON.stringify as a medium. You might be able to mock localStorage if you allowed to do some IO.
http://caniuse.com/#search=localstorage
Just for fun, there are alternative hacks if we want to restrict our self using only sync:
It is tempting to use setTimeout because one might think it is a good way to encapsulate synchronous requests together. Sadly, there is a gotcha. Async in javascript doesn't mean it gets to run in its own thread. Async is likely postponing the call, waiting for others to finish. Lucky for us there is light at the end of the tunnel because it is likely you can use xhttp.timeout along with xhttp.ontimeout to recover. See Timeout XMLHttpRequest
This means we can implement tiny version of a schedular that handles failed request and allocates time to try again or report error.
// The basic idea.
function runSchedular(s)
{
setTimeout(function() {
if (s.ptr < callQueue.length) {
// Handles rescheduling if needed by pushing the que.
// Remember to set time for xhttp.timeout.
// Use xhttp.ontimeout to set default return value for failure.
// The pushed function might do something like: (in pesudo)
// if !d1
// d1 = get(http...?query);
// if !d2
// d2 = get(http...?query);
// if (!d1) {pushQue tryAgainLater}
// if (!d2) {pushQue tryAgainLater}
// if (d1 && d2) {pushQue handleData}
s = s.callQueue[s.ptr++](s);
} else {
// Clear the que when there is nothing more to do.
s.ptr = 0;
s.callQueue = [];
// You could implement an idle counter and increase this value to free
// CPU time.
s.t = 200;
}
runSchedular(s);
}, s.t);
}
Doesn't "deprecated" mean that it's available, but won't be forever. (I read elsewhere that it won't be going away for a number of years.) If so, and this is for hobby projects, then perhaps you could use async: false for now as a quick way to get the job done?
I am new to angular and want to use it to send data to my app's backend. In several occasions, I have to make several http post calls that should either all succeed or all fail. This is the scenario that's causing me a headache: given two http post calls, what if one call succeeds, but the other fails? This will lead to inconsistencies in the database. I want to know if there's a way to cancel the succeeding calls if at least one call has failed. Thanks!
Without knowing more about your specific situation I would urge you to use the promise error handling if you are not already doing so. There's only one situation that I know you can cancel a promise that has been sent is by using the timeout option in the $http(look at this SO post), but you can definitely prevent future requests. What happens when you make a $http call is that it returns a promise object(look at $q here). What this does is it returns two methods that you can chain on your $http request called success and failure so it looks like $http.success({...stuff...}).error({...more stuff..}). So if you do have error handling in each of these scenarios and you get a .error, dont make the next call.
You can cancel the next requests in the chain, but the previous ones have already been sent. You need to provide the necessary backend functionality to reverse them.
If every step is dependent on the other and causes changes in your database, it might be better to do the whole process in the backend, triggered by a single "POST" request. I think it is easier to model this process synchronously, and that is easier to do in the server than in the client.
However, if you must do the post requests in the client side, you could define each request step as a separate function, and chain them via then(successCallback, errorCallback) (Nice video example here: https://egghead.io/lessons/angularjs-chained-promises).
In your case, at each step you can check if the previous one failed an take action to reverse it by using the error callback of then:
var firstStep = function(initialData){
return $http.post('/some/url', data).then(function(dataFromServer){
// Do something with the data
return {
dataNeededByNextStep: processedData,
dataNeededToReverseThisStep: moreData
}
});
};
var secondStep = function(dataFromPreviousStep){
return $http.post('/some/other/url', data).then(function(dataFromServer){
// Do something with the data
return {
dataNeededByNextStep: processedData,
dataNeededToReverseThisStep: moreData
}
}, function(){
// On error
reversePreviousStep(dataFromPreviousStep.dataNeededToReverseThisStep);
});
};
var thirdFunction = function(){ ... };
...
firstFunction(initialData).then(secondFunction)
.then(thirdFunction)
...
If any of the steps in the chain fails, it's promise would fail, and next steps will not be executed.
I have read some posts about this topic and the answers are comet, reverse ajax, http streaming, server push, etc.
How does incoming mail notification on Gmail works?
How is GMail Chat able to make AJAX requests without client interaction?
I would like to know if there are any code references that I can follow to write a very simple example. Many posts or websites just talk about the technology. It is hard to find a complete sample code. Also, it seems many methods can be used to implement the comet, e.g. Hidden IFrame, XMLHttpRequest. In my opinion, using XMLHttpRequest is a better choice. What do you think of the pros and cons of different methods? Which one does Gmail use?
I know it needs to do it both in server side and client side.
Is there any PHP and Javascript sample code?
The way Facebook does this is pretty interesting.
A common method of doing such notifications is to poll a script on the server (using AJAX) on a given interval (perhaps every few seconds), to check if something has happened. However, this can be pretty network intensive, and you often make pointless requests, because nothing has happened.
The way Facebook does it is using the comet approach, rather than polling on an interval, as soon as one poll completes, it issues another one. However, each request to the script on the server has an extremely long timeout, and the server only responds to the request once something has happened. You can see this happening if you bring up Firebug's Console tab while on Facebook, with requests to a script possibly taking minutes. It is quite ingenious really, since this method cuts down immediately on both the number of requests, and how often you have to send them. You effectively now have an event framework that allows the server to 'fire' events.
Behind this, in terms of the actual content returned from those polls, it's a JSON response, with what appears to be a list of events, and info about them. It's minified though, so is a bit hard to read.
In terms of the actual technology, AJAX is the way to go here, because you can control request timeouts, and many other things. I'd recommend (Stack overflow cliche here) using jQuery to do the AJAX, it'll take a lot of the cross-compability problems away. In terms of PHP, you could simply poll an event log database table in your PHP script, and only return to the client when something happens? There are, I expect, many ways of implementing this.
Implementing:
Server Side:
There appear to be a few implementations of comet libraries in PHP, but to be honest, it really is very simple, something perhaps like the following pseudocode:
while(!has_event_happened()) {
sleep(5);
}
echo json_encode(get_events());
The has_event_happened function would just check if anything had happened in an events table or something, and then the get_events function would return a list of the new rows in the table? Depends on the context of the problem really.
Don't forget to change your PHP max execution time, otherwise it will timeout early!
Client Side:
Take a look at the jQuery plugin for doing Comet interaction:
Project homepage: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Comet
Google Code: https://code.google.com/archive/p/jquerycomet/ - Appears to have some sort of example usage in the subversion repository.
That said, the plugin seems to add a fair bit of complexity, it really is very simple on the client, perhaps (with jQuery) something like:
function doPoll() {
$.get("events.php", {}, function(result) {
$.each(result.events, function(event) { //iterate over the events
//do something with your event
});
doPoll();
//this effectively causes the poll to run again as
//soon as the response comes back
}, 'json');
}
$(document).ready(function() {
$.ajaxSetup({
timeout: 1000*60//set a global AJAX timeout of a minute
});
doPoll(); // do the first poll
});
The whole thing depends a lot on how your existing architecture is put together.
Update
As I continue to recieve upvotes on this, I think it is reasonable to remember that this answer is 4 years old. Web has grown in a really fast pace, so please be mindful about this answer.
I had the same issue recently and researched about the subject.
The solution given is called long polling, and to correctly use it you must be sure that your AJAX request has a "large" timeout and to always make this request after the current ends (timeout, error or success).
Long Polling - Client
Here, to keep code short, I will use jQuery:
function pollTask() {
$.ajax({
url: '/api/Polling',
async: true, // by default, it's async, but...
dataType: 'json', // or the dataType you are working with
timeout: 10000, // IMPORTANT! this is a 10 seconds timeout
cache: false
}).done(function (eventList) {
// Handle your data here
var data;
for (var eventName in eventList) {
data = eventList[eventName];
dispatcher.handle(eventName, data); // handle the `eventName` with `data`
}
}).always(pollTask);
}
It is important to remember that (from jQuery docs):
In jQuery 1.4.x and below, the XMLHttpRequest object will be in an
invalid state if the request times out; accessing any object members
may throw an exception. In Firefox 3.0+ only, script and JSONP
requests cannot be cancelled by a timeout; the script will run even if
it arrives after the timeout period.
Long Polling - Server
It is not in any specific language, but it would be something like this:
function handleRequest () {
while (!anythingHappened() || hasTimedOut()) { sleep(2); }
return events();
}
Here, hasTimedOut will make sure your code does not wait forever, and anythingHappened, will check if any event happend. The sleep is for releasing your thread to do other stuff while nothing happens. The events will return a dictionary of events (or any other data structure you may prefer) in JSON format (or any other you prefer).
It surely solves the problem, but, if you are concerned about scalability and perfomance as I was when researching, you might consider another solution I found.
Solution
Use sockets!
On client side, to avoid any compatibility issues, use socket.io. It tries to use socket directly, and have fallbacks to other solutions when sockets are not available.
On server side, create a server using NodeJS (example here). The client will subscribe to this channel (observer) created with the server. Whenever a notification has to be sent, it is published in this channel and the subscriptor (client) gets notified.
If you don't like this solution, try APE (Ajax Push Engine).
Hope I helped.
According to a slideshow about Facebook's Messaging system, Facebook uses the comet technology to "push" message to web browsers. Facebook's comet server is built on the open sourced Erlang web server mochiweb.
In the picture below, the phrase "channel clusters" means "comet servers".
Many other big web sites build their own comet server, because there are differences between every company's need. But build your own comet server on a open source comet server is a good approach.
You can try icomet, a C1000K C++ comet server built with libevent. icomet also provides a JavaScript library, it is easy to use as simple as:
var comet = new iComet({
sign_url: 'http://' + app_host + '/sign?obj=' + obj,
sub_url: 'http://' + icomet_host + '/sub',
callback: function(msg){
// on server push
alert(msg.content);
}
});
icomet supports a wide range of Browsers and OSes, including Safari(iOS, Mac), IEs(Windows), Firefox, Chrome, etc.
Facebook uses MQTT instead of HTTP. Push is better than polling.
Through HTTP we need to poll the server continuously but via MQTT server pushes the message to clients.
Comparision between MQTT and HTTP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KNPXPmx88E
Note: my answers best fits for mobile devices.
One important issue with long polling is error handling.
There are two types of errors:
The request might timeout in which case the client should reestablish the connection immediately. This is a normal event in long polling when no messages have arrived.
A network error or an execution error. This is an actual error which the client should gracefully accept and wait for the server to come back on-line.
The main issue is that if your error handler reestablishes the connection immediately also for a type 2 error, the clients would DOS the server.
Both answers with code sample miss this.
function longPoll() {
var shouldDelay = false;
$.ajax({
url: 'poll.php',
async: true, // by default, it's async, but...
dataType: 'json', // or the dataType you are working with
timeout: 10000, // IMPORTANT! this is a 10 seconds timeout
cache: false
}).done(function (data, textStatus, jqXHR) {
// do something with data...
}).fail(function (jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown ) {
shouldDelay = textStatus !== "timeout";
}).always(function() {
// in case of network error. throttle otherwise we DOS ourselves. If it was a timeout, its normal operation. go again.
var delay = shouldDelay ? 10000: 0;
window.setTimeout(longPoll, delay);
});
}
longPoll(); //fire first handler