For what business cases were background sessions meant?

Miklos_Hollender

This feature was added but not explained who and why needs it and for what purposes.

Same thing for queries, although I have figured this one out, it is not really an end user feature (because users cannot add filters manually before executing them, making them more or less useless as direct reports), it is more like meant for developers for performance reasons.

Romul

If you make different service running parallel to the current one. If you use this new service as, let's say, "NAS" (there is no NAS in 2013, but you may call it this way) working through Job Query generating reports or executing some codeunit. This session will be Background sesson.

Miklos_Hollender

What do you mean there is no NAS? Page 677 even has fields like "start on this NAS instance".

If I get it right it would be uses mainly for error handling?

Marije_Brummel

The NAS and the Service Tier are the same.

You can start a Job Queue on the normal Service Tier that all users use or setup one specifically for the NAS.

I use the backgroundsessions to run multithreaded interfaces. With classic you were required to purchase a NAS license for every thread, now it is multithreaded for free.

BardurKnudsen

Background sessions can be used to run stuff in the background - Things that the user doesn't want to wait for to finish.
Miklos: Think of STARTSESSION as an async CODEUNIT.RUN.
Sessions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 2(v=nav.70).aspx
Of course you then need to keep track of whether the process finished, and if so, if it did it successfully. Therefore we also created the Job Queue functionality that can be used to 'streamline' the background processes.
And correct, just like queries, this is not end-user functionality; they are tools for the partner to improve performance or to put long-running tasks out of the user's view.

Besides: There is indeed a "NAS" in NAV2013. However, instead of a separate UI-less "client" as in NAV5.0, it's a separate process inside the NAV server.

Romul

Miklos Hollender wrote:

What do you mean there is no NAS? Page 677 even has fields like "start on this NAS instance".

If I get it right it would be uses mainly for error handling?

Explore STARTSESSION and STOPSESSION functions. Also, Job Queue codeunits working with it.
For better understanding you may write simple codeunit making some basic stuff and use separate session by means of the operators mentioned above.

Edit: sorry, the answer almost duplicates of what BardurKnudsen wrote in more details. Mentioned it too late.