Azure Service Bus - Scheduled Message Delivery

January 01, 2021

Azure Service Bus sets itself apart from other message brokers by the dizzying array of additional and useful features that it provides out of the box. This particular one is really useful for things like scheduled e-mails. Let’s say, for example, that you’re an event organiser, and you want to notify people a few days before the event. This feature enables you to tell Service Bus to simply send a message at that time (you could have a simple Azure function that then picked up the message and sent an e-mail).

If you’re new to Service Bus, or using it with .Net, then start here.

NuGet

The basic NuGet package you’ll need is here:



Microsoft.Azure.ServiceBus

Reading the Service Bus Message

For the purpose of this post, we’ll just set-up a basic console application that sends and receives the message; let’s start with the read:



private static Task ReadMessageEvent(string connectionString)
{
    var queueClient = new QueueClient(connectionString, QUEUE\_NAME);

    var messageHandlerOptions = new MessageHandlerOptions(ExceptionHandler);
    queueClient.RegisterMessageHandler(handleMessage, messageHandlerOptions);

    return Task.CompletedTask;
}

private static Task ExceptionHandler(ExceptionReceivedEventArgs arg)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Something bad happened!");
    return Task.CompletedTask;
}

private static Task handleMessage(Message message, CancellationToken cancellation)
{
    string messageBody = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(message.Body);
    Console.WriteLine("Message received: {0}", messageBody);

    return Task.CompletedTask;
}

There’s not much to say here - this event will simply print a message to the console when it’s received.

Schedule the Service Bus Message

Now that we’ve set up a method to receive the messages, let’s send one. You could add this to the same console app (obviously it would have to occur after the Read!)




var queueClient = new QueueClient(connectionString, QUEUE\_NAME);

string messageBody = $"{DateTime.Now}: Happy New Year! ({Guid.NewGuid()}) You won't get this until {dateTime}";
var message = new Message(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(messageBody));

long sequenceNumber = await queueClient.ScheduleMessageAsync(message, dateTime);
//await queueClient.CancelScheduledMessageAsync(sequenceNumber);

await queueClient.CloseAsync();

dateTime is simply the time that you wish to send the message; for example:



var dateTime = DateTime.UtcNow.AddSeconds(10)

Will send the message in 10 seconds.

The commented line above will then cancel the message from being sent - you only need to provide the sequence number (which you get from setting up the schedule in the first place).

References and A GitHub Example

For a working sample of this, please see here.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60437666/how-to-defer-a-azure-service-bus-message



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