Hi Rick, I am receiving a JSON object in web connection (which turns it into a VFP object) from an external system. I then want to process the VFP object. The problem is that the external system needs to receive a status of 200 within 5 seconds, which doesn't provide enough time to process the received JSON object data since it requires retrieving some additional values by issuing another API call. I am using loJsonSerializer.Serialize to turn the VFP object into a string and save it to a unique file using STRTOFILE. All of the above works great, but I am trying to avoid using a timer-based program to process the stored data. There doesn't seem to be a way to return a status of 200 and then continue on with processing the stored data. Return 200 seems to be the end of the function. Maybe the time based routine is the safest way to go, but thought I'd get your thoughts. As always, thanks for your help.

Welcome to asynchronous request processing which is hard!

You can't and you shouldn't run long requests this way. Web Connection is FoxPro which is single threaded so once you return the response you're done with the request.

Instead, if you need to do a fire and forget request you need to offload the processing to some asynchronous operation - either a daemon that runs in the background and processes the request, or something running on a timer. You can stuff the incoming request into a database or local file for the background process to find it and process it. The client then should check back and see occasionally if the request is done.

Alternately you can also use WebSockets to serve requests which allows for two-way communication, but this is significantly more complicated. Web Connection has support for some of this but it's not really a good way to go because of Web Connection/FoxPro's single threaded nature - you wouldn't want the slow processing to tie up a server instance.

+++ Rick ---

Hi Rick, Thanks for the advice, I think I'll write the object to a file, set a flag on a timer-based object and return a 200 response and trust the timer-based system to pick up and post the point-of-sale data to the ERP. I can run a test at the end of the business day to ensure I've posted everything in the cloud-based point-of-sale to the ERP. Any POS transaction ids not in the ERP can be pulled by an app. I'm just wanting to make everything as real-time as possible. Your answer makes total sense.