ServicedComp architecture issue

[Trebek]

Hello all:

We have a serviced comp that is called by our webservice. This component is
responsible for updating various db tables as well as formatting the results
of the client's request . This has worked very well for us over the last
two years because client requests have always been designed to be completed
async. For the first time, management wants us to offer our services in
both async and sync. Obviously this will be a problem for us since much of
our business logic is built around the async idea. An issue I'm struggling
with is how to handle the the client requests that are synchronous. We
would like to keep the formatting of the client's request results contained
within the serviced comp for a few reasons including auto retry, transaction
support, single point of update, etc...

Although I know this is not possible, it would be ideal to treat the async
calls as 'server activated' and the sync calls as 'library activated'.

When async :

IAppInterface iai =
(IAppInterface) Marshal.BindToM oniker("queue:/.....ServicedCO M");
iai.PerformInte rfaceAction(".. ...");

When sync :

ServicedCOM sc = new ServicedCOM();
string results = sc.PerformInsta nceAction(".... "); //not an interface
method

Thus results would have the client's sync response and we would still
preserve retry, transactions, etc...

Since the above is not possible, does anyone have any suggestions about how
to handle this? Some things we are considering include removing the parsing
logic from the serviced comp and only handling the db work there but we are
running into difficulty. For example, some results are shipped to the comp
complete and ready to be inserted (after being transformed) while others
arrive partial and require the comp to perform additional operations to
complete the results before formatting and inserting. These additional
operations will be hard to perform outside of the comp because we do not
control all of the additional operations (other web service calls, http
resources, etc...) and like to have the failover capability provided by the
comp. I'm hoping to get some design suggestions for how best to
refactor/redesign this process. We have total freedom since this is just in
the 'concept' stage at this point.

Any help is appreciated,

Alex