Task And Cancellation

Foreword

C# 5 has integrated the Parallel Framework directly into the language. Those who are familiar with tasks and ContinueWith knows how much pain it was prior to the apparition of the async / await keywords.

Having async and await keywords allow us to easily produce code with control flow, try catch that simplify greatly the code.

One scenario tought that is missing love is Cancellation. Here is a sample code that does not support cancellation :

static void Main(string[] args)

{

    WriteInConsole();

    Console.ReadLine();

    Console.WriteLine("Key Press!");

    Console.ReadLine();

}

private static async void WriteInConsole()

{

    for (var i = 0; i < int.MaxValue; i++)

    {

        await Task.Delay(1000);

        Console.WriteLine("Task running {0}", i);

    }

}

Will output:

Task running 0
Task running 1
Task running 2
Key Press!
Task running 3
Task running 4
...

When you hit returns, the task running the WriteInConsole method will continue to work. This is fine since it really show that the async is working correctly and another thread is working. Now, let’s add cancellation support.

Cancelling a Task with a CancellationToken

The prescribed way of cancelling a task is by specifying a CancellationToken to the task when it is created. A CancellationToken is a ValueType that can be passed to algorithms in order to federated the Cancellation of a bunch of operations.

A CancellationToken does not contains a Cancel method. Tto create a CancellationToken, you must first create a CancellationTokenSource that will issue a CancellationToken.

Here is the code that supports cancellation :

static void Main(string[] args)

{

    CancellationTokenSource tokenSource = new CancellationTokenSource();

    CancellationToken token = tokenSource.Token;

    Task.Run(() => WriteInConsole(token), token);

    Console.ReadLine();

           

    tokenSource.Cancel();

    Console.WriteLine("Key press!");

           

    Console.ReadLine();

}

private static void WriteInConsole(CancellationToken token)

{

    for (var i = 0; i < int.MaxValue; i++)

    {

        Task.Delay(1000).Wait(token);

        Console.WriteLine("Task running {0}", i);

    }

}

Will output :

Task running 0
Task running 1
Task running 2
Key Press!

When you hit returns, the task running WriteInConsole method will stop working as well as the Wait inside the WriteInConsole method. In fact, the Task.Delay(1000).Wait(token) will produce an OperationCancelledException to end the loop automatically.

Notice that the code contains reference to a CancellationTokenSource and requires to pass a CancellationToken to all the algorithm in order to correctly stop the threads.

Let’s see how we can improve things a bit.

Removing the CancellationToken noise

We will remove all CancellationTokenSource and CancellationToken from the code so we can focus on the stuff that matters. Here is what the program should looks like :

static void Main(string[] args)

{

    var t = Tasks.StartWithCancellation(WriteInConsole);

    Console.ReadLine();

           

    t.Cancel();

    Console.WriteLine("Key press!");           

    Console.ReadLine();

}

private static void WriteInConsole()

{

    for (var i = 0; i < int.MaxValue; i++)

    {

        Task.Delay(1000).WaitWithCancellation();

        Console.WriteLine("Task running {0}", i);

    }

}

As you can see, we remove all the noise.  Looking at the code, you will see that instead of using Task.Run, we use Tasks.StartWithCancellation because we want to create the task with a CancellationToken.

Diving deep into the bits...

Create a custom Task Factory method

We will create a task factory method for supporting cancellation and an ambient context. Here is what the code looks like :

public static Task StartWithCancellation(Action action)

{

    var source = new CancellationTokenSource();

    var token = source.Token;

    if (_ambientToken.CanBeCanceled)

    {

        token = CancellationTokenSource

            .CreateLinkedTokenSource(token, _ambientToken)

            .Token;

    }

    Action a = () =>

    {

        _ambientToken = token;

        try

        {

            action();

        }

        finally

        {

            _ambientToken = CancellationToken.None;

        }

    };

    var task = Task.Factory.StartNew(a, token);

    _sources.Add(task, source);

           

    return task;

}

First important thing here is that we are using an ambientToken. The ambient token is a static field declared using the attribute ThreadStatic.

[ThreadStatic]

private static CancellationToken _ambientToken;

This is usefull because it gives us a contextual CancellationToken relative to the current thread so we can « enlist » more task or Wait using the same propagated CancellationToken.

Another important thing here is that we need to allow fluent cancellation of the task. To make sure we can do this we need to attach a CancellationTokenSource to the Task. Know, starting with .Net 4.0, there is a very neat way of doinig this by using a ConditionalWeakTable.

private static readonly ConditionalWeakTable<Task, CancellationTokenSource> _sources = new ConditionalWeakTable<Task, CancellationTokenSource>();

Here is how the we link the CancellationTokenSource to the Task :

_sources.Add(task, source);

Add a Cancel method on the Task

By using the ConditionalWeakTable, we can find attached to the task the CancellationTokenSource and cancel the task. Instead of deriving the Task and create a method on the class, we will use an extension method  to add a Cancel operation to the task.

public static void Cancel(this Task task)

{

    var cancellationTokenSource = _sources.GetValue(task, _ => null);

    if (cancellationTokenSource != null)

        cancellationTokenSource.Cancel();

}

Wait with ambient cancellation

The last method we need to add is a Wait that can automatically cancel waiting based on our ambient CancellationToken. We do this with the following code :

public static void WaitWithCancellation(this Task task)

{

    task.Wait(_ambientToken);

}

Final Words

As you can see, we can do something that help improve the Task Cancellation scenario. I really wish that better cancellation supports will come in the next language or .net version.

Happy coding.