Discussion: Async support for the client sdk

[dbkegley]

Continuing the discussion from this thread

This comment in the fastapi project describes the problem pretty succinctly.

It sounds like calling any blocking code from an async endpoint will block the main thread.

[tdstein]

I've been experimenting...

If you invoke a synchronous method within a ThreadPoolExecutor, it doesn't block the main thread.

import asyncio

from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor
from posit.client import Client

async def my_async_method():
    # Your asynchronous code here
    print("Async method started")
    await asyncio.sleep(1)
    print("Async method completed")


def sync_method():
    # Your synchronous code here
    print("Sync method started")
    client = Client()
    res = client.users.get_current_user()
    print(res.json())
    print("Sync method completed")


async def main():
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()

    # Create a ThreadPoolExecutor
    executor = ThreadPoolExecutor()

    # Run the synchronous method outside a thread pool
    # This blocks...
    sync_method()

    # Run the synchronous method in the thread pool
    # Don't await yet
    fn = loop.run_in_executor(executor, sync_method)

    # Run the asynchronous method
    await my_async_method()
    await fn


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

Sync method started
{'email': '[email protected]', ...
Sync method completed
Sync method started
Async method started
{'email': '[email protected]', ...
Sync method completed
Async method completed