web services - Approach for REST request with long execution time?

Question

We are building a REST service that will take about 5 minutes to execute. It will be only called a few times a day by an internal app. Is there an issue using a REST (ie: HTTP) request that takes 5 minutes to complete?

Do we have to worry about timeouts? Should we be starting the request in a separate thread on the server and have the client poll for the status?

Answer 1

This is one approach.

Create a new request to perform ProcessXYZ

POST /ProcessXYZRequests

201-Created
Location: /ProcessXYZRequest/987

If you want to see the current status of the request:

GET /ProcessXYZRequest/987

<ProcessXYZRequest Id="987">
  <Status>In progress</Status>
  <Cancel method="DELETE" href="/ProcessXYZRequest/987"/>
</ProcessXYZRequest>

when the request is finished you would see something like

GET /ProcessXYZRequest/987

<ProcessXYZRequest>
  <Status>Completed</Status>
  <Results href="/ProcessXYZRequest/Results"/>
</ProcessXYZRequest>

Using this approach you can easily imagine what the following requests would give

GET  /ProcessXYZRequests/Pending
GET  /ProcessXYZRequests/Completed
GET  /ProcessXYZRequests/Failed
GET  /ProcessXYZRequests/Today