[ic] Forking processes

Jonathan Clark jonc at webmaint.com
Thu Jan 13 19:13:53 EST 2005


> > System particulars: O/S RH 2.4.21-27.0.1.ELsmp, IC 5.2.0, Perl 5.8.5
> >
> > I am looking for a way to solve a process waiting problem.  The process
> > I need to call is a web service running on a windows 2003 server.  Right
> > now I call the web service from the receipt.html page as a user defined
> > function, but many times the web service takes too long and the receipt
> > page doesn't show quickly enough causing customers to double hit the
> > submit button.  I would like to be able to call the web service and then
> > not wait for the response so the receipt page displays quickly.  I don't
> > need a response from the web service.
>
> I suggest to call the webservice from a (cron) job instead of from the
> receipt page.

Yep, detach it from the order process altogether.

Using the Jobs feature of Interchange you can write a file in ITL to look
for new orders in the transactions table and process your call to the remote
server, then update a flag or the order status in the transactions table to
indicate a successful call.

Test your job by placing it in the pages directory while you work on it,
then move to say etc/jobs/orderupdate when its finished.

To get your IC job to run, you then add a few directives to the catalog.cfg:

 Jobs base_directory etc/jobs
 Jobs log logs/jobs.log

and maybe:
 Jobs MaxLifetime <max life in seconds>

if your jobs may take a _really_ long time, the default is 600 seconds.

and then call from cron with:

/path/to/interchange/bin/interchange --jobgroup=orderupdate --runjobs=catalo
gname

good luck!

Jonathan.


--
Jonathan Clark
Managing Director,
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