Question

Are regular iterator blocks (i.e. “yield return”) incompatible with “async” and “await”?

This gives a good idea of what I’m trying to do:

async Task<IEnumerable<Foo>> Method(String [] Strs)
{
    // I want to compose the single result to the final result, so I use the SelectMany
    var finalResult = UrlStrings.SelectMany(link =>   //i have an Urlstring Collection 
                   await UrlString.DownLoadHtmlAsync()  //download single result; DownLoadHtmlAsync method will Download the url's html code 
              );
     return finalResult;
}

However, I get a compiler error citing “unable to load message string from resources”.

Here is another attempt:

async Task<IEnumerable<Foo>> Method(String [] Strs)
{
    foreach(var str in strs)
    {
        yield return await DoSomethingAsync( str)
    }
}

But again, the compiler returns an error: “unable to load message string from resources”.

---

Here is the real programming code in my project

This is very useful when I have an List Task,that task can be download HTML from a URL
and I use the syntax “yield return await task”, the result is I want IEnumerable<Foo>. I don’t want write this code:

async Task<IEnumerable<String>> DownLoadAllURL(String [] Strs)
{
    List<Foo> htmls= new ...
    foreach(var str in strs)
    {
        var html= await DownLoadHtmlAsync( str)
        htmls.Add(item)
    }
    return htmls;
}

But it seems that I have to.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

What you are describing can be accomplished with the Task.WhenAll method. Notice how the code turns into a simple one-liner. What happens is that each individual url begins downloading and then WhenAll is used combine those operations into a single Task which can be awaited.

Task<IEnumerable<string>> DownLoadAllUrls(string[] urls)
{
    return Task.WhenAll(from url in urls select DownloadHtmlAsync(url));
}