Stop EJB Processing

I have a stateful bean that does a lot of heavy-duty processing on a server. However, I want the user to be able to stop the processing via a command on a GUI. Basically, I do not want to kill the bean itself, but have it stop its current processing and return to a "ready" state. Is this possible?

Thanks,
Jeff

http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=11031

Thanks for the reply Chu. Unfortunately, I'm not sure this relates to my particular problem. I'm not trying ot multi-thread processes on the application server - the order is strict. My multi-threading comes in because I have a GUI launch this process and I want the GUI to also be able to stop this process...

Session (stateful/stateless) EJBs are synchronous, such that, the EJB is doing nothing(in ready state) between invocations of business methods.

What you are saying is that, a GUI calls a business method on the bean, and it takes a long time to execute/return. You need a feature to somehow stop this execution, and allow the long running execution to be interrupted/returned. If this is the case, this cannot be done in EJBs, you need to use asynchronous JMS/messaging EJBs.

EDIT: I guess it can possibly be achieved if you allow the long running process to poll another "flag" EJB, and have the GUI set the flag to interrupt it.
[ October 13, 2006: Message edited by: Chu Tan ]

I'm somewhat of a newbie to EJBs, so I'm not exactly sure how JMS/MDBs would be used for this...I'm still not sure I understand how I could return during the middle of execution, regardless of what types of beans I'm using. I have basic familiarity with JMS because that is what I use to send asynchronous status messages back to the GUI to display a progress bar. Could you elaborate a little more if possible?

Thank you for all of your help thus far.

Jeff

Here's a very rough sketch:

GUI invokes a stateful ejb to start the job.

Stateful ejb creates an entity bean, which serves as flag/identifier/metadata for the job. The stateful ejb asynchronously invokes a MDB, passing as argument the identifier for the job. The MDB manages the execution/interruption of the job. Ejb returns.

GUI then polls some JMS queue for the job results.

GUI may terminate the process anytime by invoking a method on stateful EJB, which sets the job identifier ejb flag to "terminate".

While MDB executes the job, it intermittently checks the placeholder/flag entity EJB to see whether the job has been interrupted.

If MDB eventually completes the process, it send results to JMS queue.
If MDB terminates the process, it sends a process terminated message to JMS queue.

Note: you'll need to look into reentrant and transaction demarcation issues when implementing this.

Seems to make sense. Thanks for the help!