Windows Service – C# – VS2010
I have multiple instances of a FileWatcher Service. Each one looks for a different extension in the directory. I have a separate Router service that monitors the directory for zip files and renames the extensions to one of the values that the services look at.
Example:
Directory in question (all FileWatcher Services monitor this directory) contains the following files:
a.zip, b.zip, c.zip
FileWatcher1 looks for extensions of *.000, FileWatcher2 looks for extensions of *.001, FileWatcher3 looks for extensions of *.002
The Router will see the .zip files and change the file extensions on the zip files, but it should keep in sequence in order to delegate the same amount of work to each FileWatcher.
Also, if there are two zip files dropped, it would change a.zip -> a.000, and b.zip -> b.001, but if 5 minutes go by and another batch of zip files are dropped, it should know to rename the next file to *.002.
I have everything working fine, but now I need to implement the sequential part to the Router and am not sure the best way of implementation (currently router is changing every extension to *.000 thus only one FileWatcher is getting the work). I know this might be considered a cheap way of doing this but it’s all we really need at the moment. Any help would be appreciated.
Maybe a different way of looking at it. Have you thought about having a single watcher and then using a thread pool? The reason why I am suggesting this is that you will have to start looking at the sizes and complexities of the fields to adequately distribute the work. You might start pushing more work to .000 because it’s next in line when it is still busy processing a large amount of data from the first job whereas .001 could be free as it was processing a small file.
If you really want to get around the problem of the next extension in line, why not just keep a static variable with the next extension number. I am not 100% sure if the Router Filewatcher will run multiple threads when it sees new files one after the other but I don’t think so. If that does happen then you will need to put some thread safety code when accessing the static variable.