How to wrap your synchronous implementation in an asynchronous implementation.

In this article, we will be discussing why it is sometimes useful to wrap your synchronous implementation in an asynchronous implementation.

Introduction

Async programming is an important paradigm in modern software development, allowing you to perform long-running tasks without blocking the calling thread. Async programming is particularly useful in scenarios where the operation may take a long time to complete, or when the operation is interacting with a slow resource, such as a network or a database.

One common scenario where you may need to wrap your synchronous implementation in an asynchronous implementation is when you are working with an API or a library that does not provide async versions of its methods. In these cases, you can use the Task.Run method to wrap the synchronous methods in a task, allowing you to use the await keyword to asynchronously wait for the operation to complete.

Example: Wrapping a Synchronous Data Processor

To illustrate this concept, let’s consider the following synchronous IDataProcessor interface:

public interface IDataProcessor
{
    void ProcessData(IEnumerable<IData> data);
}

This interface has a single method, ProcessData, which takes an IEnumerable of IData objects as input and processes the data.

Now let’s say that you want to use this IDataProcessor interface in an async context, but the interface does not provide an async version of the ProcessData method. To use this interface asynchronously, you can create an async wrapper class that wraps the synchronous implementation in an async implementation.

Here is an example of how you can wrap the synchronous IDataProcessor implementation in an asynchronous implementation:

public class AsyncDataProcessor : IDataProcessor
{
    private readonly IDataProcessor _dataProcessor;

    public AsyncDataProcessor(IDataProcessor dataProcessor)
    {
        _dataProcessor = dataProcessor;
    }

    public Task ProcessDataAsync(IEnumerable<IData> data)
    {
        return Task.Run(() => _dataProcessor.ProcessData(data));
    }
}

This implementation has a single method, ProcessDataAsync, which takes an IEnumerable of IData objects as input and asynchronously processes the data. The implementation uses the Task.Run method to wrap the synchronous ProcessData method in a task, allowing it to be called asynchronously using the await keyword.

To use this implementation, you can simply create an instance of AsyncDataProcessor and call the ProcessDataAsync method, passing in the list of data as an argument. For example:

var dataProcessor = new AsyncDataProcessor(new DataProcessor());
await dataProcessor.ProcessDataAsync(data);