Messages don't need to be dispatched immediately. Delayed delivery is a feature that sends messages into the future to be delivered and processed at a later time.
Delayed delivery is used for:
- Timeout messages sent by sagas
- Delayed retries, to retry a message after successive delays when immediate retries don't result in successful processing
- Explicitly sending a message with a delay, as described below
Delaying messages using HandleCurrentMessageLater
The HandleCurrentMessageLater()
method was primarily used to defer messages when using Versions 2.x and below, before the Defer functionality was introduced in Versions 3 and above. While this API is still supported in Versions 6 and below, there are significant caveats in using this API.
- Calling this method would create a copy of the message that has the same identifier, header, and body. This message would then be put at the end of the queue. The endpoint will eventually pick up this message once all the other messages in its queue have been processed. To make this work, the message pipeline will not abort which means any business transaction that's part of calling this method will also get committed.
- If the endpoint's queue is empty, or the condition to put the message back into the queue is incorrect, the message goes back into the queue immediately causing the endpoint to process the same message without any delay. This behavior can cause an endless loop which will manifest itself as a high system resource utilization by the endpoint.
HandleCurrentMessageLater()
cannot be used in conjunction with the Outbox.Delaying message dispatching
Calling bus.
the handling of the message is deferred by certain amount of time. After that time the message is passed to be handled by the same endpoint. Semantically bus.
is equivalent to calling bus.
after time condition is met. See also sending local.
Using this mechanism delayed delivery can be achieved by calling bus.
which can be seen in Delayed Delivery Sample.
SendLocal
, Defer
will also change the message's reply-to address to the endpoint deferring the message. Calling Reply
on a deferred message will send the reply to itself.Using a TimeSpan
Delays delivery of a message for a specified duration.
bus.Defer(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(30), new MessageToBeSentLater());
Using a DateTime
Delays delivery of a message until a specified point in time.
bus.Defer(new DateTime(2016, 12, 25), new MessageToBeSentLater());
Caveats
Delayed delivery of messages is supported when one of the following requirements are met:
- The transport supports delayed delivery natively.
- The Timeout Manager feature is enabled and the endpoint is not a send-only endpoint.
When deferring a message, it is sent to the Timeout Manager requesting it to deliver the message at a later time or deferred by using the transports native capability to defer messages.
How it works
NServiceBus provides delayed delivery feature for transports that don't have native support for delayed message delivery. All Transports except MSMQ support delayed message delivery natively and therefore don't require persistence to store timeouts. To learn more about NServiceBus delayed message store refer to the Timeout Manager article.