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
Only send operations can be deferred. Publish and reply operations cannot be deferred.
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);
// OR
await endpoint.Send(new MessageToBeSentLater(), sendOptions, handlerContext.CancellationToken);
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);
// OR
await endpoint.Send(new MessageToBeSentLater(), options, handlerContext.CancellationToken);
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 MSMQ transport delayed delivery article.