I started looking at <cfthread> today, and realized that it really does not have any sort of management facility built into it. while you can view / manage threads from within the server monitor…

1) you can’t get a status for a thread except from the calling page, or from another thread that was called from that page. this presents a problem if you have long running threads, or if you have other parts of your application that rely on thread status.

2) if there is an error that was generated during a thread process, again … you can access this at the page level, or from another thread, but there really isn’t anything that will help you to manage this within your application logic, say if you wanted to fire a thread again later.

Matt and I discussed an approach that could work well for managing these two things that are missing natively in cfthread, and act as a good foundation for further thread management. Keep in mind that this article really only consists of some raw ideas with pseudocode at this point. I’ll get around to writing the actual components later, and i’m sure it will develop into something much different from the ideas on this page.

The concept is based on two components that manipulate a server struct and act as a wrapper for cfthread:

the server struct consists of the following:

server.instance.threadName
server.instance.initTimeStamp
server.instance.startTimeStamp
server.instance.endTimeStamp
server.instance.elapsedTime
server.instance.function (join, run, sleep, terminate)
server.instance.priority
server.instance.object
server.instance.method
server.instance.argList
server.instance.status
server.instance.error

threadManager.cfc
This is the thread manager responsible for creating new threads, cleaning up old threads, and contains the getters / setters for thread status and errors.

thread.cfc
This is the thread object that acts as a container for thread processes. It builds a thread using <cfthread>, and creates a structure in the server scope containing the name of the thread, timestamp when it was created, current thread status, and any errors that occur.

myThread = thread.new(run, object.method, argumentList);

what this would do is create a new ‘run thread’ using the object.method(), given a name | value list of arguments. it would return the name of the thread as a UUID, and would add the thread instance to the server.instance struct. note that we’re passing in a list of arguments and values not for thread.new, but for the object.method.

newThread.exec(myThread);

this would execute the thread created previously, updating server.instance.startTimeStamp and server.instance.status in the server.instance struct. if the thread runs into any try/catch … this would be updated to server.instance.error. once the thread is completed, server.instance.status would be updated, as well as server.instance.endTimeStamp. all we’re doing here is passing the myThread object into newThread.exec, and then wrapping the object.method(argumentList); within <cfthread>