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
Delaying a message is done using SendOptions
and the DelayDeliveryWith
method. This allows to defer the sending of a message to any endpoint. The behavior of delayed handling using DelayDeliveryWith
can be seen in Delayed Delivery Sample.
Using a TimeSpan
Delays delivery of a message for a specified duration.
var sendOptions = new SendOptions();
sendOptions.DelayDeliveryWith(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(30));
await handlerContext.Send(new MessageToBeSentLater(), sendOptions)
.ConfigureAwait(false);
// OR
await endpoint.Send(new MessageToBeSentLater(), sendOptions)
.ConfigureAwait(false);
Using a DateTime
Delays delivery of a message until a specified point in time.
var options = new SendOptions();
options.DoNotDeliverBefore(new DateTime(2016, 12, 25));
await handlerContext.Send(new MessageToBeSentLater(), options)
.ConfigureAwait(false);
// OR
await endpoint.Send(new MessageToBeSentLater(), options)
.ConfigureAwait(false);
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.