I am really excited about a new feature for Optitask that I finally released today. The addition is called Optitask Communications Library that allows developers to kick-start Optitask processes from their .NET code locally or remotely over a TCP/IP or HTTP connection.
In more than one occurance I was asked for a solution to start processes remotely. Customers often have a set of stored procedures that takes time to complete that times out when it’s called from their web page or desktop programs. With the new library it’s possible to setup a normal task in Optitask to run the Stored Procedures in managed thread and start the process with the library from a web page.
The Optitask service engine uses the Windows Communication Framework extensively that enabled me with very little code to write a small .NET wrapper around the WCF functions and with two lines of code it’s now possible to start remote or local Optitask processes.
To use this functionality you would need to download and install the Client Communications Library from our website. Then you need to add a project reference to OT.ClientComm.dll and finally, you need to add the code to start the process:
OT.ClientComm.Connection conn = new OT.ClientComm.Connection (false, "http://serveraddress/OTService", "DomainName", "UserName", "Password"); conn.EnqueueTask("//task[@guid='e50ee464-4f7f-4819-89f4-b39f28a0e45c']");
In the construction of the object you need to pass the address of the server, the protocol (either net.tcp or http) and your Windows Security Credentials if they are used.
The second function takes an XPath parameter to the task that you want to start. You can find the task ID from the Config.xml file in the Optitask directory.
