Hi~
Hi Ezra,
Please, do not apologize!!! I just wanted to give feedback on what I
encountered. This looks very promising and I hope my feedback can be
useful.
Over the course of the next few days I will be incorporating this into
my application to fix a few serious issues I have with long running
tasks. For example, I have an action that creates a pdf, attaches it to
an email and then sends the email. For some of my remote users this
gets done a few times by accident (meaning they invoke the action and
for some reason the action is executed multiple times). I believe this
is due to slow response time and browser retry but I don't know for
sure. I do know the user isn't attempting the action multiple times via
a gui action. It's causing problems in my app though and I hope
BackgrounDRb will help me fix it.
I definitely will need some sort of interface where I can look at the
invoked tasks and see the result of that task. In your samples, you
show some ajax stuff that sends feedback to the client (if desired). In
some of my use cases, I don't want (or need) the client to see what the
result is. Instead, I want a management interface where I can go in and
see the result of each of the invoked tasks.
Do you have anything like this yet? If not, then I'll probably create a
new table to log all the requests. Then, as a request completes
(successfully or otherwise) I'll log the result. From that table, if I
have a failed task, I will go and "restart it" after I have diagnosed
the root cause. If you have a code like this already then please share!
If not, then I will be able to provide something soon and if you
want it you can have it.
Also, I notice that you have a basic timing mechanism (like repeat task
every xx interval). I would love to get rid of my scheduled tasks that
run via Windows Scheduler and hope that this will do the trick. I want
specified times though so I may make a few changes to the code. For
example, while it is true that I want a task to run once every 12 hours,
I want it to only be started at 6:00 am and 6:00 pm! If I stop and
restart the service for some reason in the middle of the day, I don't
want that task to kickstart itself and then be off schedule!
You also mention wanting more samples and one of them being an email
example. If you give me the requirements then I may be able to put that
together for you as that's what I'm tackling at the moment (outbound
emails). I also import emails every 15 minutes from an email account
and will be replacing my scheduled task with BackgrounDRb - so I should
be able to have both send and receive covered for you if the
requirements match closely enough to mine.
Let me know if I can help. Further, if you have issues that need
investigating on Windows then don't hesitate to email me. I don't check
the email account regularly that I use for this mailing list but if you
email to mmodica at cox dot net then I'll get it and help.
Regards,
Michael
Hey Michael-
I am working on a stats add on for the plugin that will allow you to have an admin view of all active workers and their state. I might possibly add a simple model to track these results but I am not sure if I want to make it depend on a database just yet. I'll think about it some more.
If you plan on using the plugin a bit then please come join the mailing list for it, it is fairly active and its a better place to ask questions about the plugin. The mailing list sign up address is in the readme.
Cheers-
-Ezra
