How to assign Task.Run(await some async function that returns byte[]) to a variable

Question

I have a function in c#, call it

public async Task<byte[]> PrintLetter(int Id)    
{
    some code here
    return byte[2125];
}

I was calling it like this: (not sure what the point of the _ is)

 _ = Task.Run(async () => await PrintLetter(cid));

And it was running the print job and working fine. But now I want to assign this PrintLetter() to a variable so I can pass along this byte[] and not just print to printer.

So I wanted to do this:

var files =  await PrintLetter(cid);
return Ok(File(files, "application/pdf", "Letter.pdf"));

But I'm nervous to blindly remove the Task.Run here. Any advice

Answer 1

_ = Task.Run(async () => await PrintLetter(cid));

So, what this is actually doing is a form of fire-and-forget:

1. The Task.Run ensures that PrintLetter runs outside of the ASP.NET request context. (I'm assuming this is ASP.NET pre-Core).
2. The _ = discards the task.

So this will execute PrintLetter in a separate thread and not wait for it to complete before returning to the client.

The problem is that fire-and-forget is dangerous. This was never a good solution to begin with. Fortunately, the new requirements (passing back the byte array) means that the fire-and-forget should be removed anyway. This just leaves this:

var files =  await PrintLetter(cid);
return Ok(File(files, "application/pdf", "Letter.pdf"));