Invoking Web Services the Better Way
Written on Wednesday, January 02, 2008 by Edwin Sanchez
Web services are around for some time and it has been supported by lots of languages and development tools, including Java and the .Net languages. In .Net, invoking web service methods is as easy as calling your own methods from a class library. There are requirements, though, before you can invoke any web service method. Just like your class library, you need to create a reference to the web service from the invoking client application. In .Net, this is a web reference. After that, you can declare any variable for your web service, like the one below:
MyWebService service = new MyWebService();
Calling it is also simple:
returnedvalue = service.MethodName();
In .Net 2.0, Microsoft has added support for the new multithreaded programming with event-based asynchronous pattern when generating the proxy code by the WSDL tool. This opens a new way of invoking web services, better and faster. And this allows the programmer to easily utilize this feature without creating complex multithreading code. In the MSDN magazine, it has been pointed out that many web sites that utilize ASP.Net are not making use of asynchronous web service calls and in the end, experience the “Server Unavailable” error when lots of processes have consumed the thread pool. In order to conserve this thread pool, you need to call web services asynchronously. In my last post, I have pointed out that this is one of the design considerations when developing applications using web services.
Implementing it is easy. You just need to add little code. The first thing to do is to add the Async attribute to the @Page directive to allow asynchronous calls:
<%@ Page Language="C#" Async="true" %>
And then, depending on your requirements, you can utilize what event you need. What I have tried is to use an event handler for the Completed event of my proxy. Below is an example:
service.MethodNameCompleted += new WebServiceProxy.MethodNameCompletedEventHandler(service_MethodNameCompleted);
The
Lastly, you call the
returnedvalue = service.MethodNameAsync(params);
That’s the additional code you need to make call web services asynchronously. It is not so much of a big deal to add and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
When is this applicable to use?
- When you perform time-consuming tasks such as database operations (like a native query or SODA returning a large object set)
- When you need to execute multiple operations simultaneously
- When you need to wait for resources without “hanging” your application.
You need to take note of this one thing: When you are still debugging your web methods, adding a breakpoint somewhere in the web service method (or a class library being invoked by the web service method) will not work, that is, the debugger will not stop in the breakpoint you specified. In order to work around on this, you can try calling the method synchronously at first. That is, calling it the usual way. When you are finish debugging, change the code to make use of asynchronous calls. Even better, a unit test can verify if your code is working or not before assembling all the components. This way, debugging will be less.
So, how about that? If your hands are getting itchy to try this out, try it now. You won’t regret you have used this feature.
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