title: Asynchronously return http status code 202 for REST service?
body: <p>We have a REST service that calls out to a system process that could possibly take upwards of 2 minutes to process.  Since on clients I don't want to wait 30-seconds to 2 minutes for a response back from the server, can I return a 202 to the client to notify that it's in processing but doesn't necessarily need to wait for the process to finish?</p>
  
  <p>Is there a safe way to handle this? (I'm sure there is thread safety issues here, especially if the service could get hit with tons of requests at once, so creating tons of threads may not be the solution.)</p>
  
  <p>Something we are exploring is using batch processing that checks every 5 minutes or so to check the db for reports that need generating (which is what the system process is for), but I was curious about this possibility.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>
  The final product is actually a PDF report that gets generated, and then emailed to the user.  I am mostly trying to get around having to wait the ~2 minutes of waiting for the service response back on the consuming client.</p>