.net core: run big tasks in the background - entity-framework

Question

I created a .net core web api project. It has gotten kinda big and I want to program a "delete" operation which deletes a lot of stuff from the database. Since there are a lot of things to delete, this will be a long running process. So I thought maybe I can run this in the background and just write status updates somewhere for the user to see whats happening.
I googled this and I found BackgroundWorkerQueue and thought this might be my solution.
So I registered the service and everything and here is my method that calls it:
public class DeleteController : ControllerBase {
private readonly BackgroundWorkerQueue _backgroundWorkerQueue;
public AdminController(BackgroundWorkerQueue backgroundWorkerQueue){
_backgroundWorkerQueue = backgroundWorkerQueue;
}
public async Task<ActionResult> HugeDeleteMethod(int id)
{
// some prechecks here...
// and here I thought I'd start the background task
_backgroundWorkerQueue.QueueBackgroundWorkItem(async token =>
{
var a = _context.StatusTable.Find(id);
a.Status += "Blablablabla\n";
_context.StatusTable.Update(a);
await _context.SaveChangesAsync();
//now start doing delete operations
});
}
}
And that class looks like this:
public class BackgroundWorkerQueue
{
private ConcurrentQueue<Func<CancellationToken, Task>> _workItems = new ConcurrentQueue<Func<CancellationToken, Task>>();
private SemaphoreSlim _signal = new SemaphoreSlim(0);
public async Task<Func<CancellationToken, Task>> DequeueAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
await _signal.WaitAsync(cancellationToken);
_workItems.TryDequeue(out var workItem);
return workItem;
}
public void QueueBackgroundWorkItem(Func<CancellationToken, Task> workItem)
{
if (workItem == null)
{
throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(workItem));
}
_workItems.Enqueue(workItem);
_signal.Release();
}
}
There is also a DeleteService, which is also called in my startup, but I am not sure what it does:
public class DeleteService : BackgroundService
{
private readonly BackgroundWorkerQueue queue;
public NukeService(BackgroundWorkerQueue queue)
{
this.queue = queue;
}
protected override async Task ExecuteAsync(CancellationToken stoppingToken)
{
while (!stoppingToken.IsCancellationRequested)
{
var workItem = await queue.DequeueAsync(stoppingToken);
await workItem(stoppingToken);
}
}
}
Both are added in my startup.cs:
services.AddHostedService<DeleteService>();
services.AddSingleton<BackgroundWorkerQueue>();
Well, maybe I'm going about this all wrong. This is never called it seems, the StatusTable field "Status" is always empty. So how do I do this?

Answer 1

You just need to subclass BackgroundService class or implement IHostedService and than register your service as hosted service.
This will run a service in the background. Than in your service you can leverage the BlockingQueue that will perform tasks only when they are added, e.g. like this:
public class MyService : BackgroundService {
private readonly BlockingCollection<long> queue;
public MyService(){
this.queue = new BlockingCollection<long>();
Task.Run(async () => await this.Execute());
}
public void AddId(long id) {
this.queue.Add(id);
}
private async Task Execute()
{
foreach (var id in this.queue.GetConsumingEnumerable())
{
... do your stuff ...
}
}
}
services.AddHostedService<MyService>();
Here is the docu: Background services in .net core