Continuing with an attached child Task in .NET C#

A child Task, a.k.a a nested Task, is a Task that’s started within the body of another Task. The containing Task is called the parent.

We saw here how to create an attached child Task and here how to create continuation tasks. We can now marry the two concepts. If you don’t know what they are then make sure to check out those posts as well.

This is how you attach a child task to a parent, create a continuation task to the child task and attach the continuation task to the parent as well:

Task parent = Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
	Console.WriteLine("Starting child task...");

	Task child = Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
	{
		Console.WriteLine("Child running. Going to sleep for a sec.");
		Thread.Sleep(1000);
		Console.WriteLine("Child finished and throws an exception.");
		throw new Exception();
	}, TaskCreationOptions.AttachedToParent);

	child.ContinueWith(antecedent =>
	{
		// write out a message and wait
		Console.WriteLine("Continuation of child task running");
		Thread.Sleep(1000);
		Console.WriteLine("Continuation finished");
	}, TaskContinuationOptions.AttachedToParent
		| TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted);				
});

try
{
	Console.WriteLine("Waiting for parent task");
	parent.Wait();
	Console.WriteLine("Parent task finished");
}
catch (AggregateException ex)
{
	Console.WriteLine("Exception: {0}", ex.InnerException.GetType());
}

Note the TaskCreationOptions parameter in the StartNew method: AttachedToParent. We also introduce a filter to the continuation task: run it only if the task before that, i.e. the ‘child’ has faulted. Which will happen as we throw an exception in the body of ‘child’.

If you run this code the you’ll see that the exception thrown by the child task is caught in the try-catch block. The original exception has been packaged within an AggregateException. Also, the Wait() method will wait for the parent task to finish which in turn waits for the child to finish. So Wait() indirectly waits for any attached children the parent Task may have. Finally, you’ll see that the continuation task runs as ‘child’ has faulted.

View the list of posts on the Task Parallel Library here.