Question

From what I’ve read about Tasks, the following code should cancel the currently executing task without throwing an exception. I was under the impression that the whole point of task cancellation was to politely “ask” the task to stop without aborting threads.

The output from the following program is:

Dumping exception

[OperationCanceledException]

Cancelling and returning last calculated prime.

I am trying to avoid any exceptions when cancelling. How can I accomplish this?

void Main()
{
    var cancellationToken = new CancellationTokenSource();

    var task = new Task<int>(() => {
        return CalculatePrime(cancellationToken.Token, 10000);
    }, cancellationToken.Token);

    try
    {
        task.Start();
        Thread.Sleep(100);
        cancellationToken.Cancel();
        task.Wait(cancellationToken.Token);         
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Dumping exception");
        e.Dump();
    }
}

int CalculatePrime(CancellationToken cancelToken, object digits)
{  
    int factor; 
    int lastPrime = 0;

    int c = (int)digits;

    for (int num = 2; num < c; num++)
    { 
        bool isprime = true;
        factor = 0; 

        if (cancelToken.IsCancellationRequested)
        {
            Console.WriteLine ("Cancelling and returning last calculated prime.");
            //cancelToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();
            return lastPrime;
        }

        // see if num is evenly divisible 
        for (int i = 2; i <= num/2; i++)
        { 
            if ((num % i) == 0)
            {             
                // num is evenly divisible -- not prime 
                isprime = false; 
                factor = i; 
            }
        } 

        if (isprime)
        {
            lastPrime = num;
        }
    }

    return lastPrime;
}

Answer 1

You are explicitly throwing an Exception on this line:

cancelToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();

If you want to gracefully exit the task, then you simply need to get rid of that line.

Typically people use this as a control mechanism to ensure the current processing gets aborted without potentially running any extra code. Also, there is no need to check for cancellation when calling ThrowIfCancellationRequested() since it is functionally equivalent to:

if (token.IsCancellationRequested) 
    throw new OperationCanceledException(token);

When using ThrowIfCancellationRequested() your Task might look more like this:

int CalculatePrime(CancellationToken cancelToken, object digits) {
    try{
        while(true){
            cancelToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();

            //Long operation here...
        }
    }
    finally{
        //Do some cleanup
    }
}

Also, Task.Wait(CancellationToken) will throw an exception if the token was cancelled. To use this method, you will need to wrap your Wait call in a Try...Catch block.

MSDN: How to Cancel a Task