"Mark Nelson" wrote:

> Ethan,
>
> To answer your first question, you need to use asynchronous websevices.
> For such long running web-services asynchronous webservices is the
> recommended approach. You can have a call-back delegate to notify the client.
>
> Please refer the following url for further details
>
> http://www.codeproject.com/cs/webservices/wsasync.asp
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/10/WickedCode/
>
> To answer your second question, i think the code execution is not reaching
> the path where the variable 'status' is getting populated
> --
> Thanks & Regards,
> Mark Nelson
>
>
> "Ethan Strauss" wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> > I have a web service which is doing a lot of processing and taking 4-5
> > minutes to do so. The processing is split into several discrete steps and I
> > would like for the service to be able to tell the client when it is done
> > with each step.
> > I have tried to do this in a couple of ways and neither have worked. Any
> > ideas how I might get it to work?
> >
> > What I have tried was:
> >
> > 1) Splitting out each processing step into a different web method and then
> > having the client call each method as the one before it finished.
> > The sort of work, in that the client knew what was happening when,
> > but the I could not get the service to remember the intermediate results and
> > thus it did everything after the first step on null objects. I thought of
> > passing the results back to the client and then having it pass them back to
> > the service, but there is too much data in the intermediate results for that
> > to be reasonable.
> >
> > 2) Having the WebService class have a private status string and a public
> > WebMethod GetStatus which returns that string. The service then updates the
> > string as appropriate and the client asks for it periodically.
> > The value of the status string never actually changed. I wrote code
> > (C#):
> > status = "Starting Blast analysis.";
> > BlastSolutionSet thisSolution =
> > DatabaseAccess.GetExperiment(experimentGuid);
> > thisSolution.BlastAll();
> > status = "Collating Blast Data";
> > thisSolution.AssignBlastResults();
> > status = "Querying NCBI";
> > thisSolution.CollectNcbiData();
> > status = "Done";
> > In debug mode, the value of status was always "".
> >
> >
> > Ay thoughts?
> > Thanks!
> > Ethan
> >
> >