Asynchronous Task Processing - Developers Guide


This guide is intended to help with the creation of applications using the Asynchronous Task Processing subsystem of EOxServer.

The first part is guiding creation of the simple task producer, i.e., an application needing the asynchronous processing capabilities.

The second part helps with creation of a task consumer, i.e., the part of code pulling tasks from the work queue and executing them. The task consumer is part of Asynchronous Task Processing Daemon.

An overview of the ATP capabilities is presented in “Asynchronous Task Processing”. The database model used in by the ATP subsystem is described in “Task Tracker Data Model”. The complete API reference can be found in “eoxserver.resources.processes.tracker”.

Simple ATP Application

Here in this section we will prepare step-by-step a simple demo application making use of the ATP subsystem. The complete application is available at location:

<EOxServer instal.dir.>/tools/

The prerequisite of starting the application is that the correct path to the EOxServer installation and instance is set together with the correct Django settings module.

Initially the application must import the right python objects from the tracker() module:

from eoxserver.resources.processes.tracker import \
    registerTaskType, enqueueTask, QueueFull, \
    getTaskStatusByIdentifier, getTaskResponse, deleteTaskByIdentifier

By this command we imported following objects: i) task type registration function, ii) the task creation (enqueue) subroutine, iii) an exception class risen in case of full task queue unable to accept (most likely temporarily) new tasks, iv) task’s status polling subroutine, v) the response getter function and finally vi) the subroutine deleting an existing task. These are the ATP Python objects needed by our little demo application.

Step 1 - Handler Subroutine

Let’s start with preparation of an example of subroutine to be executed - handler subroutine. The example handler below sums sequence of numbers and stores the result:

def handler( taskStatus , input ) :
    """ example ATP handler subroutine """
    sum = 0
    # sum the values
    for val in input :
        try :
            sum += float( val )
        except ValueError:
            # stop in case on ivalid input
            taskStatus.setFailure("Input must be a sequence of numbers!")
    # store the response and terminate
    taskStatus.storeResponse( str(sum) )

Any handler subroutine (see also dummyHandler()) receives two parameters: i) an instance of the TaskStatus class and an input parameter. The input parameter is set during the task creation and can be any Python object serialisable by the pickle module.

Step 2 - New Task Type Registration

Once we have prepared the handler subroutine we can register the task type to be performed by this subroutine:

registerTaskType( "SequenceSum" , "tools.atp_demo.handler" , 60 , 600 , 3 )

The registerTaskType() subroutine registers a new task type named “SequenceSum”. Any task instance of this task type will be processed by the handler subroutine. The handler subroutine is specified as importable module path. Any task instance not processed by an ATPD within 60 seconds (measured from the moment the ATPD pulls a task from the queue) is considered to be abandoned and it is automatically re-enqueued for new processing. The number of the re-enqueue attempts is limited to 3. Once a task instance is finished it will be stored for min. 10 minutes (600 seconds) before it gets removed.

Step 3 - Creating New Task

Once the task handler has been registered as a new task type we can create a task’s instance:

while True :
        enqueueTask( "SequenceSum" , "Task001" , (1,2,3,4,5) )
    except QueueFull : # retry if queue full
        print "QueueFull!"
        time.sleep( 5 )

The enqueueTask() creates a new task instance “Task001” of task type “SequenceSum”. The tuple (1,2,3,4,5) is the input to the handler subroutine. In case of full task queue new task cannot be accepted and the QueueFull() is risen. Since we want the task to be enqueued a simple re-try loop must be employed.

Step 4 - Polling the task status

After task has been created enqueued for processing its status can be polled:

while True :
    status = getTaskStatusByIdentifier( "SequenceSum" , "Task001" )
    print time.asctime() , "Status: " , status[1]
    if status[1] in ( "FINISHED" , "FAILED" ) : break
    time.sleep( 5 )

The task status is polled until the final status (FINISHED or FAILED) is reached. The task must be identified by unique pair of task type and task instance identifiers.

NOTE: The task instance is guaranteed to be unique for given task type identifier, i.e., there might be two task with the same instance identifier but different type identifier.

Step 5 - Getting the logged task history

The history of the task processing is logged and the log messages can be extracted by getTaskLog() function:

print "Processing history:"
for rec in getTaskLog( "SequenceSum" , "Task001" ) :
    print "-" , rec[0] , "Status: " , rec[1][1] , "\t" , rec[2]

This function returns list of log records sorted by time (older first).

Step 6 - Getting the task results

Once the task has been finished the task response can be retrieved:

if status[1] == "FINISHED" :
    print "Result: " , getTaskResponse( "SequenceSum" , "Task001" )

Step 7 - Removing the task

Finally, the result task is not needed any more and can be removed from DB:

deleteTaskByIdentifier( "SequenceSum" , "Task001" )

Executing ATP Task

In this section we will briefly describe all the steps necessary to pull and execute task instance from the queue. As working example we encourage you the source Python code of the ATPD located at:

<EOxServer instal.dir.>/tools/

The invocation of the ATP server is described in “Asynchronous Task Processing”.

Initially the application must import the python objects from the tracker module:

from eoxserver.resources.processes.tracker import *

For convenience we have made available whole content of the module.

Pulling a task from queue

The ATPD is expected to pull task from the queue repeatedly. For simplicity we avoid the loop definition and we will rather focus on the loop body. Following command pulls a list of tasks from queue:

    # get a pending task from the queue
    taskIds = dequeueTask( SERVER_ID )
except QueueEmpty : # no task to be processed
    # wait some ammount of time
    time.sleep( QUEUE_EMPTY_QUERY_DELAY )

This command tries to pull exactly one task at time from the DB queue but the applied mechanism of pulling does not guaranties that none or more than one task would be return. Thus the dequeuing function returns a list of tasks and the implementation must take this fact into account. Further, the dequeue function requires unique ATPD identifier (SERVER_ID).

The dequeueTask() function changes automatically the status from ENQUEUED to SCHEDULED and log the state transition. The optional logging message can be provided.

Task Execution

In case we have picked one of the pulled tasks and stored it to taskId variable we can proceed with the task execution:

# create instance of TaskStatus class
pStatus = TaskStatus( taskId )
    # get task parameters and change status to STARTED
    requestType , requestID , requestHandler , inputs = startTask( taskId )
    # load the handler
    module , _ , funct = requestHandler.rpartition(".")
    handler = getattr( __import__(module,fromlist=[funct]) , funct )
    # execute handler
    handler( pStatus , inputs )
    # if no terminating status has been set do it right now
    stopTaskSuccessIfNotFinished( taskId )
except Exception as e :
    pStatus.setFailure( unicode(e) )

In order to execute the task couple of actions must be performed. First an instance of the TaskStatus class must be created.

The parameters of the task (task type identifier, task instance identifier, request handler and task inputs) must be retrieved by the dequeueTask() function. The function also changes the status of the task from SCHEDULED to RUNNING and logs the state transition automatically.

The handler “dot-path” must be split to module and function name and loaded dynamically by the __import__() function.

Once imported the handler function is executed passing the TaskStatus and inputs as the arguments.

The handler function is allowed but not required to set the successful terminal state of the processing (FINISHED) and if not set it is done by the stopTaskSuccessIfNotFinished() function.

Obviously, the implementation must catch any possible Python exception and record the failure (try-except block).

DB Cleanup

In addition to the normal operation each ATPD implementation is responsible for maintenance of the ATPD subsystem in a consistent state. Namely, i) the ATPD must repeatedly check for the abandoned “zombie” tasks and restart them by calling reenqueueZombieTasks() function and ii) the ATPD must remove DB records of the finished “retired” tasks by calling deleteRetiredTasks() function.