Azure table entity existence/synchronisation

Question

I'm using an azure table query to retrieve all error entities assigned to a user. Afther that I change a property of the entity to state that the entity is in processing mode. After I have processed the entity I remove the entity from the table.

When I do parallel tests it can happen that during the query, an entity was already processed and deleted by another thread. So I get the error 404 ResourceNotFound when I want to Replace the entity.

Is there a way to test, if the entity was changed outside of the thread or if it still exists? Is it better to catch error 404 and ignore it or should I query for the entity again (seems all not right for me)?

TableQuery<ErrorObjectTableEntity> query = new TableQuery<ErrorObjectTableEntity>().Where(TableQuery.GenerateFilterCondition("PartitionKey", QueryComparisons.Equal, user));
List<ErrorObjectTableEntity> queryResult = table.ExecuteQuery(query).OrderBy(x => x.action).ToList();
foreach (ErrorObjectTableEntity entity in queryResult)
{
     entity.inProcess = true;
     try
     {
         TableOperation updateOperation = TableOperation.Replace(entity);
         table.Execute(updateOperation);     
      }
      catch
      {
          //..some logging here
          //catch error 404?
      }
      //do some action
      try
      {
          TableOperation deleteOperation = TableOperation.Delete(entity);
          table.Execute(deleteOperation);
      }
      catch{...}
}

Joe Giardino Joe Giardino · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-16T21:56:27

There are a couple of issues here as far as best practice. Your code as written could simply ignore the exception assuming another worker removed it but this could end up masking other classes of errors. One solution would be to use Queues to insert messages per user query, and then have various workers retrieve a message and process the query for a specific user. This way if a node goes down the app would absorb the fault and continue on. Additionally, this would keep your workers from duplicating work which would optimize the entire application. Lastly, if you don't care about the state of the entity and the keys are predictable you can use the Merge semantic to simply update a given property of an Entity without replacing the entire thing.

Azure table entity existence/synchronisation

2 Answers