Once a day, I want my ASP.NET MVC4 website, which may be running on multiple servers, to email a report to me. This seems like a pretty common thing to want to do, but I’m having a tough time coming up with a good way to do it.
Trying to run a timer on a server to do this work is problematic for a couple of reasons. If I have multiple servers then I’d have the timer running on all of them (in case a server goes down); I’d need to coordinate between them, which gets complicated. Also, trying to access the database via Entity Framework from a background thread adds the complication that I must employ a locking strategy to serialize construction/disposal of the DbContext object between the periodic background thread and the “foreground” Controller thread.
Another option would be to run a timer on the servers, but to have the timer thread perform a GET to a magic page that generates and emails the report. This solves the DbContext problem because the database accesses happen in a normal Controller action, serialized with all of the other Controller accesses to the database. But I’m still stuck with the problem of having potentially more than one timer running, so I’d need some smarts in the Controller action to ignore redundant report requests.
Any suggestions? How is this sort of thing normally done?
Answers:
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Method 1
You should not be doing this task from your web application as Phil Haack nicely explains it in his blog post.
How is this sort of thing normally done?
You could perform this task from a Windows Service or even a console application that is scheduled to run at regular intervals using the Windows Scheduler.
Method 2
The proper solution is to create a background service that runs independently of your website. However, if that is not an option there is a hack where you can use the cache as explained in Easy Background Tasks in ASP.NET by Jeff Atwood.
Method 3
A few options:
- If you are hosting on Azure as a Website, check out WebJobs which was released recently in preview (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-create-web-jobs/)
- If you don’t want the pain of extracting out your email logic outside of the website, expose that functionality at a url (with a handler, mvc action, etc.) and then run a Windows Scheduled task that hits that url on a schedule.
- Write a simple console app that is executed similarly via a Windows Scheduled task.
- Or write a simple Windows Service that internally is looping and checking the time and when reached, hits that url, runs that exe, or has it’s own code to send you the email.
Method 4
I would recommend running Quartz.NET as a Windows Service:
Quartz.NET - Enterprise Job Scheduler for .NET Platform
There’s boilerplate code for a Windows Service in the download.
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0