How to wait until item goes through pipeline?

Question

So, I'm trying to wrap my head around Microsoft's Dataflow library. I've built a very simple pipeline consisting of just two blocks:

var start = new TransformBlock<Foo, Bar>();
var end = new ActionBlock<Bar>();
start.LinkTo(end);

Now I can asynchronously process Foo instances by calling:

start.SendAsync(new Foo());

What I do not understand is how to do the processing synchronously, when needed. I thought that waiting on SendAsync would be enough:

start.SendAsync(new Foo()).Wait();

But apparently it returns as soon as item is accepted by first processor in pipeline, and not when item is fully processed. So is there a way to wait until given item was processed by last (end) block? Apart from passing a WaitHandle through entire pipeline.

Answer 1

In short that's not supported out of the box in data flow. Essentially what you need to do is to tag the data so you can retrieve it when processing is done. I've written up a way to do this that let's the consumer await a Job as it gets processed by the pipeline. The only concession to pipeline design is that each block take a KeyValuePair<Guid, T>. This is the basic JobManager and the post I wrote about it. Note the code in the post is a bit dated and needs some updates but it should get you in the right direction.

namespace ConcurrentFlows.DataflowJobs {
    using System;
    using System.Collections.Concurrent;
    using System.Collections.Generic;
    using System.Threading.Tasks;
    using System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow;

    /// <summary>
    /// A generic interface defining that:
    /// for a specified input type => an awaitable result is produced.
    /// </summary>
    /// <typeparam name="TInput">The type of data to process.</typeparam>
    /// <typeparam name="TOutput">The type of data the consumer expects back.</typeparam>
    public interface IJobManager<TInput, TOutput> {
        Task<TOutput> SubmitRequest(TInput data);
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// A TPL-Dataflow based job manager.
    /// </summary>
    /// <typeparam name="TInput">The type of data to process.</typeparam>
    /// <typeparam name="TOutput">The type of data the consumer expects back.</typeparam>
    public class DataflowJobManager<TInput, TOutput> : IJobManager<TInput, TOutput> {

        /// <summary>
        /// It is anticipated that jobHandler is an injected
        /// singleton instance of a Dataflow based 'calculator', though this implementation
        /// does not depend on it being a singleton.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="jobHandler">A singleton Dataflow block through which all jobs are processed.</param>
        public DataflowJobManager(IPropagatorBlock<KeyValuePair<Guid, TInput>, KeyValuePair<Guid, TOutput>> jobHandler) {
            if (jobHandler == null) { throw new ArgumentException("Argument cannot be null.", "jobHandler"); }

            this.JobHandler = JobHandler;
            if (!alreadyLinked) {
                JobHandler.LinkTo(ResultHandler, new DataflowLinkOptions() { PropagateCompletion = true });
                alreadyLinked = true;
            }
        }

        private static bool alreadyLinked = false;            

        /// <summary>
        /// Submits the request to the JobHandler and asynchronously awaits the result.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="data">The input data to be processd.</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public async Task<TOutput> SubmitRequest(TInput data) {
            var taggedData = TagInputData(data);
            var job = CreateJob(taggedData);
            Jobs.TryAdd(job.Key, job.Value);
            await JobHandler.SendAsync(taggedData);
            return await job.Value.Task;
        }

        private static ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, TaskCompletionSource<TOutput>> Jobs {
            get;
        } = new ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, TaskCompletionSource<TOutput>>();

        private static ExecutionDataflowBlockOptions Options {
            get;
        } = GetResultHandlerOptions();

        private static ITargetBlock<KeyValuePair<Guid, TOutput>> ResultHandler {
            get;
        } = CreateReplyHandler(Options);

        private IPropagatorBlock<KeyValuePair<Guid, TInput>, KeyValuePair<Guid, TOutput>> JobHandler {
            get;
        }

        private KeyValuePair<Guid, TInput> TagInputData(TInput data) {
            var id = Guid.NewGuid();
            return new KeyValuePair<Guid, TInput>(id, data);
        }

        private KeyValuePair<Guid, TaskCompletionSource<TOutput>> CreateJob(KeyValuePair<Guid, TInput> taggedData) {
            var id = taggedData.Key;
            var jobCompletionSource = new TaskCompletionSource<TOutput>();
            return new KeyValuePair<Guid, TaskCompletionSource<TOutput>>(id, jobCompletionSource);
        }

        private static ExecutionDataflowBlockOptions GetResultHandlerOptions() {
            return new ExecutionDataflowBlockOptions() {
                MaxDegreeOfParallelism = Environment.ProcessorCount,
                BoundedCapacity = 1000
            };
        }

        private static ITargetBlock<KeyValuePair<Guid, TOutput>> CreateReplyHandler(ExecutionDataflowBlockOptions options) {
            return new ActionBlock<KeyValuePair<Guid, TOutput>>((result) => {
                RecieveOutput(result);
            }, options);
        }

        private static void RecieveOutput(KeyValuePair<Guid, TOutput> result) {
            var jobId = result.Key;
            TaskCompletionSource<TOutput> jobCompletionSource;
            if (!Jobs.TryRemove(jobId, out jobCompletionSource)) {
                throw new InvalidOperationException($"The jobId: {jobId} was not found.");
            }
            var resultValue = result.Value;
            jobCompletionSource.SetResult(resultValue);            
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

I ended up using the following pipeline:

var start = new TransformBlock<FooBar, FooBar>(...);
var end = new ActionBlock<FooBar>(item => item.Complete());
start.LinkTo(end);
var input = new FooBar {Input = new Foo()};
start.SendAsync(input);
input.Task.Wait();

Where

class FooBar
{
    public Foo Input { get; set; }
    public Bar Result { get; set; }
    public Task<Bar> Task { get { return _taskSource.Task; } }

    public void Complete()
    {
        _taskSource.SetResult(Result);
    }

    private TaskCompletionSource<Bar> _taskSource = new TaskCompletionSource<Bar>();
}

Less than ideal, but it works.