Asynchronous Execution

Some commies these guys are.

For anyone else reading this "background_process" does not appear to recognize virtual hosts and gives you an error message when you install the module: "Could not determine default service host. Please configure background process in your settings.php".

There's no documentation that tells you how to do this.

By the way it doesn't take too much thought to figure out that

function mymodule_dosomething($x, $y) {
    sleep(999999999999999999999);
}

function mymodule_some_form_submit($form, $form_state) {
/*$handle =*/ background_process_start('mymodule_dosomething', $myvar1, $myvar2); 
//$handle is not necessary for 99/100 people using this. The example should omit it. It will just confuse people. 
}

is what I'm trying to do. Was it really necessary to explicitly type this? I've got other things to do.

good grief.

I have no confidence in the "background_process" module for obvious reasons.

I believe this will prove to be the superior method: (even though passing args to a cli php script is ugly)

$parm_str = escapeshellarg(serialize($fields));
system("nohup php mc_save_and_send.php $param_str 2>&1 &", $result);

mc_save_and_send.php (source)

require_once './includes/bootstrap.inc';
drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);
$fields = unserialize($argv[1]);
nc_mc_save_and_send($fields);

(Assuming the bootstrap.inc makes this work) I'll post my results in a few days. I'm worried that the cli php and the apache php are not the same thing.

I create a menu/url/link with hook_menu with a callback function: (this happens to be Drupal 6)

$items['nc-multicase-save-and-send'] = array(
	'page callback' => 'nc_multicase_save_and_send_request',
	'access callback' => TRUE,
);

function nc_multicase_save_and_send_request() {
	$logger = new DrupalLogger();
	$fields = unserialize($_POST['data']);
	$logger->logFinest('nc_multicase_save_and_send_request', 'fields');
	$logger->logFinest('nc_multicase_save_and_send_request', $fields);
	drupal_set_header('Content-Type: text/plain');
	if (isset($fields['nc-key']) && $fields['nc-key'] == '1234') {
		nc_multicase_save_and_send($fields);
		print 1;
	}
	else
		print 0;
	return NULL;
}

And then I call the cli php script somewhere in my app where I don't want to wait for a long running operation as follows:

$param_str = escapeshellarg(serialize($fields));
system("nohup php multicase_save_and_send.php $param_str ".
  "> /dev/null 2> /dev/null & echo $!", $result);

The command line script(multicase_save_and_send.php) should be in the Drupal root directory and is as follows:

 //$Id$

$data = array('data' => $argv[1]);
$hostname = gethostname();

$ch = curl_init("http://$hostname/nc-multicase-save-and-send");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE); //Return data
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);//Do not stop if invalid 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);	//Allow redirect
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

exit(0);

I assume there is a windows version of nohup and background execution system commands. There may be problems on some servers executing the curl commands against the same server it is running on. So maybe this is not "ideal". Threads would be ideal. I found a pthread extension to php but it is considered "beta" and appears to require a rebuild of php.