Windows Workflow Foundation usefull in my example?

Question

I basically want to process a large file of records i.e. 2 million. Parse the file and send each record to a web service which will for the sake of argument return a string value if success and an error string if unsuccessful which have to be appended to that record file.

So the output of my process will be the same file as original but an extra string value for each record.

So the workflow will be something like

1) Read in File 2) Parse File 3) Send Data to webservice 4) Reconstruct File

Not allowed to use the cloud for this process, but definitely thinking of splitting up the large file in batches and have several threads/virtual machines running at the same time to speed up the process. So could be multiple jobs pulling from queue of jobs, and needing to tracking these and ofcourse error handling.

Is this the sort of thing WF is built for ?

Answer 1

WF is built for supporting long running processes in reliable manner. For example, when customer want to get a loan, he comes to bank and makes a request. Request can be processed during few days and after that decision will be made. If you want to automate and model the entire process via some software application WF can be a reasonable choice in such case.

Your case is not intented to use WF.