How to cancel and raise an exception on Task.WhenA

Question

I am waiting on multiples task using Task.WhenAll. When one of them generates an exception I would like Task.WhenAll (or any other way of awaiting multiples tasks) to immediately cancel the others tasks and raise an exception.

Is it possible?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Cancellation is coopertive the WhenAll can't cancel the threads but you can pass all of them a CancellationToken and fire the token when you get a exception.

CancellationTokenSource cts = new CancellationTokenSource();

var task1 = Func1Async(cts.Token);
task1.ContinueWith(task => cts.Cancel(), cts.Token, TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted, TaskScheduler.Default);
var task2 = Func2Async(cts.Token);
task2.ContinueWith(task => cts.Cancel(), cts.Token, TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted, TaskScheduler.Default);
var task3 = Func3Async(cts.Token);
task3.ContinueWith(task => cts.Cancel(), cts.Token, TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted, TaskScheduler.Default);

await Task.WhenAll(task1, task2, task3);

from inside the methods you will need to put token.ThrowIfCancellationRequested() inside the functions to check the token and cancel the task

public async Task Func1Async(CancellationToken token)
{
    foreach(var item in GetItems1())
    {
         await item.ProcessAsync(token);
         token.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();
    }
}

---

NOTE: You could clean up the code a bit by making a extension method

public static class ExtensionMethods
{
    public Task CancelOnFaulted(this Task task, CancellationTokenSource cts)
    {
        task.ContinueWith(task => cts.Cancel(), cts.Token, taskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted, TaskScheduler.Default);
        return task;
    }

    public Task<T> CancelOnFaulted<T>(this Task<T> task, CancellationTokenSource cts)
    {
        task.ContinueWith(task => cts.Cancel(), cts.Token, taskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted, TaskScheduler.Default);
        return task;
    }
}

This would make the code look like

CancellationTokenSource cts = new CancellationTokenSource();

var task1 = Func1Async(cts.Token).CancelOnFaulted(cts);
var task2 = Func2Async(cts.Token).CancelOnFaulted(cts);
var task3 = Func3Async(cts.Token).CancelOnFaulted(cts);

await Task.WhenAll(task1, task2, task3);