How can cancel a long running request in the middle of its execution?

Question

the mechanism or approach to stop or terminate a process that is taking an extended amount of time to complete

Prasad Raveendran · Answer

Hello Alpesh, I assume, you are looking for a solution .NET platform. In .NET 6.0, you can use the CancellationToken mechanism to cancel a long-running request in the middle of its execution. Here's a basic example demonstrating how you can achieve this: using System; using System.Threading; using System.Threading.Tasks; class Program { static async Task Main() { // Create a cancellation token source var cts = new CancellationTokenSource(); // Start the long-running task var longRunningTask = LongRunningOperationAsync(cts.Token); // Wait for user input to cancel the operation Console.WriteLine("Press 'Enter' to cancel the operation."); Console.ReadLine(); // Cancel the operation cts.Cancel(); try { // Await the task to observe any potential exceptions await longRunningTask; } catch (OperationCanceledException) { Console.WriteLine("Operation was canceled."); } } static async Task LongRunningOperationAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken) { try { // Simulate a long-running operation for (int i = 0; i In this example, we create a CancellationTokenSource ( cts ) and pass its Token property to the LongRunningOperationAsync method. We then start the long-running operation in the background. To cancel the operation, we call the Cancel method on the CancellationTokenSource when the user presses Enter. The cancellation token is periodically checked in the loop of the long-running operation using cancellationToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested() . When the cancellation is requested, an OperationCanceledException is thrown. It's important to catch this exception and handle it appropriately. In the example, the catch block prints a message, but you can customize the handling based on your application's needs. Note: Always ensure that the operations you perform during cancellation are designed to be cancellable and that resources are cleaned up properly when cancellation occurs.

Sam Hobbs · Answer

Is the process something you developed or at least have access to the source code for? How does your program execute it? Or if it is started some other way then how is it executed? Is the process a console program or some other application? If it is a console program then if it supports signals then it can be stopped gracefully with a signal. If it is an application with a window then the best way to stop it probably is to send the main window a close message but there might be more necessary. As Bhavesh indicated, we ned more information.

Bhavesh Raval · Answer

Cancelling a long-running request depends on the context and technology you're using.

How can cancel a long running request in the middle of its execution?

Answers (3)