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From: Graham Stark <graham.stark@virtual-worlds.biz>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Starting a Task and Immediately Returning
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:26:06 -0800 (PST)
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Date: 2008-11-14T05:26:06-08:00
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Apologies if this is obvious, but I can't figure it out.

I'm doing some work with the Ada Web Server. I want a user to be able
to submit a job via a web page that might run for 10-20 minutes, and
have the server duly start it but respond immediately with a reply
like "your job has started" (as a web page).

So, something like:

function Web_Callback (request : in AWS.Status.Data) return
AWS.Response.Data
begin
  Start_Long_Job( ... );
  return "your job has just started";
end Web_Callback;

Can I do this using Ada's tasking facilities? So far as I understand
them, all the Tasking examples I've looked at would have the return
executed only after Start_Long_Job has completed. Is that right? But,
obviously, you can't wait 10 minutes to reply to a web request.

Or is there some other way of doing this?

Graham