How to cancel await Task.Delay()?

Question

As you can see in this code:

public async void TaskDelayTest()
{
     while (LoopCheck)
     {
          for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
          {
               textBox1.Text = i.ToString();
               await Task.Delay(1000);
          }
     }
}

I want it to set textbox to string value of i with one second period until I set LoopCheck value to false . But what it does is that it creates all iteration ones in for all and even if I set LoopCheck value to false it still does what it does asyncronously.

I want to cancel all awaited Task.Delay() iteration when I set LoopCheck=false. How can I cancel it?

Answer 1

Use the overload of Task.Delay which accepts a CancellationToken

public async Task TaskDelayTest(CancellationToken token)
{
    while (LoopCheck)
    {
        token.throwIfCancellationRequested();
        for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
        {
            textBox1.Text = i.ToString();
            await Task.Delay(1000, token);
        }
    }
}

var tokenSource = new CancellationTokenSource();
TaskDelayTest(tokenSource.Token);
...
tokenSource.Cancel();

Answer 2

If you're going to poll, poll on a CancellationToken:

public async Task TaskDelayTestAsync(CancellationToken token)
{
  for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
  {
    textBox1.Text = i.ToString();
    await Task.Delay(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1), token);
  }
}

For more information, see the cancellation documentation.

Answer 3

Just a slight comment about having a cancellation token, and using a try-catch to stop it throwing an exception - your iteration block might fail due to a different reason, or it might fail due to a different task getting cancelled (e.g. from an http request timing out in a sub method), so to have the cancellation token not throw an exception you might want a bit more complicated catch block

public async void TaskDelayTest(CancellationToken token)
{
    while (!token.IsCancellationRequested)
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
        {
            try
            {
                textBox1.Text = i.ToString();
                await DoSomethingThatMightFail();
                await Task.Delay(1000, token);
            }
            catch (OperationCanceledException) when (token.IsCancellationRequested)
            {
                //task is cancelled, return or do something else
                return;
            }
            catch(Exception ex)
            {
                 //this is an actual error, log/throw/dostuff here
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 4

After running into this problem I wrote a drop in replacement that behaves as expected if you want to do polling:

public static class TaskDelaySafe
{
    public static async Task Delay(int millisecondsDelay, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        await Task.Delay(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(millisecondsDelay), cancellationToken);
    }

    public static async Task Delay(TimeSpan delay, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        var tokenSource = CancellationTokenSource.CreateLinkedTokenSource(cancellationToken);
        var task = new TaskCompletionSource<int>();

        tokenSource.Token.Register(() => task.SetResult(0));

        await Task.WhenAny(
            Task.Delay(delay, CancellationToken.None),
            task.Task);
    }
}

It uses a cancellation token callback to complete a task and then awaits either that synthetic task or the normal Task.Delay with no cancellation token. This way it won't throw an exception when the source token is cancelled, but still responds to the cancellation by returning execution. You still need to check the IsCancellationRequested after calling it to decide what to do if it is cancelled.

Unit tests, if anyone is interested:

    [Test]
    public async Task TaskDelay_WaitAlongTime()
    {
        var sw = System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch.StartNew();
        await Base.Framework.TaskDelaySafe.Delay(System.TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5), System.Threading.CancellationToken.None);
        Assert.IsTrue(sw.Elapsed > System.TimeSpan.FromSeconds(4));
    }

    [Test]
    public async Task TaskDelay_DoesNotWaitAlongTime()
    {
        var tokenSource = new System.Threading.CancellationTokenSource(250);

        var sw = System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch.StartNew();
        await Base.Framework.TaskDelaySafe.Delay(System.TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5), tokenSource.Token);
        Assert.IsTrue(sw.Elapsed < System.TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1));
    }

    [Test]
    public async Task TaskDelay_PrecancelledToken()
    {
        var tokenSource = new System.Threading.CancellationTokenSource();
        tokenSource.Cancel();

        var sw = System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch.StartNew();
        await Base.Framework.TaskDelaySafe.Delay(System.TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5), tokenSource.Token);
        Assert.IsTrue(sw.Elapsed < System.TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1));
    }

Answer 5

using System;
using System.Threading;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace ConsoleApp1
{
    class Program
    {
        static DateTime start;
        static CancellationTokenSource tokenSource;
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            start = DateTime.Now;
            Console.WriteLine(start);


            TaskDelayTest();

            TaskCancel();

            Console.ReadKey();
        }

        public static async void TaskCancel()
        {
            await Task.Delay(3000);

            tokenSource?.Cancel();

            DateTime end = DateTime.Now;
            Console.WriteLine(end);
            Console.WriteLine((end - start).TotalMilliseconds);
        }

        public static async void TaskDelayTest()
        {
            tokenSource = new CancellationTokenSource();

            try
            {
                await Task.Delay(2000, tokenSource.Token);
                DateTime end = DateTime.Now;
                Console.WriteLine(end);
                Console.WriteLine((end - start).TotalMilliseconds);
            }
            catch (TaskCanceledException ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
            }
            finally
            {
                tokenSource.Dispose();
                tokenSource = null;
            }
        }
    }
}