Situation: I need to send notification emails every Monday at 9 a.m to all employees, remind them to due the last week report.
I basically know how to "send email in ASP.NET" (I implemented the contact us form on our website, so "sending email service" basically will be executed when people hit submit button) but I had a hard time to figure out how to make it automatically execute at a certain time, maybe I need a scheduler or something like that, I don't use any database here?
Somebody who have done it before could give a right direction?
For scheduling tasks I always recommend Quartz.NET. However, you should know that there are certain issues when you try to implement scheduler in asp.net application (in my opinion it is better to implement it in windows service). If you implement it in asp.net application remember about application pool idle time (set it to high value or disable automatic pool recycling) since pool must be active when the scheduler needs to execute the task.
You should create a windows service which will do the job
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I’m building a project that allows the user to send notifications to his customer.
I want the user to also be able to schedule these notifications to run at a specific time instead right now.
How would I achieve this? What’s the best structure? Should I create a cron job that hits the server every second to check if a task is set at this second?
You can create your own code that runs the tasks by a schedule, but there are already several 3d party tools for that. I would recommend you to have a look at
Hangfire or Quartz.NET
I would recommend to capture the details from your customer but in the backend pass on the details to the logic apps or power flow which can be timer based to create a job within those apps. I would recommend power flow as you can use it out of the box where as for logic apps you may have to configure logic apps first. as you tagged the question to Azure i am guessing you are using azure stack.
if not above suggestion may not work for you.
I have a classified web application developed with ASP.NET MVC and I need to implement a advert bump up option.
As a example if someone use this option (for 3 days) today at 10.15 AM, advert should bump up each day 10.15 AM for 3 days.
So I need a scheduler to execute some code to bring up the advert to top of the list.
Can someone explain me how approach this inside my ASP.NET MVC application or using any other 3rd party resource?
save on the database every time the user click on the option. and every time he clicks on the option check if he has click in the pass two days.
You will need to use a task scheduler service. It is not possible to create a scheduled task in ASP.NET MVC, because it simply listens and responds to HTTP requests. You could put your code to bump up the advert in an ASP.NET MVC controller, but you would still need something to send an HTTP request to trigger the controller at the given time. So there's probably not a great reason to put that code in a controller under most circumstances.
It is easy to set up scheduled tasks in most cloud computing environments. For example, in AWS you could write a Lambda function in C# and schedule it with a CloudWatch Events rule.
If your application is running on a Windows Server, the most robust way to implement a task scheduler would probably be to write a Windows Service application to call the task logic on a polling loop. It is also possible to create a console application and trigger it with the Windows Task Scheduler. This approach is quicker and easier to get up and running than developing a Windows service, but in my experience is more likely to fail and quit running without your knowledge. Either way, it will be important to make sure to write good logging and error notification code.
I'm sure there are also good 3rd party tasks schedulers out there too, I just haven't used any of them. Those are just some general guidelines, but if you want more detail on them just let me know and I can post some links.
I need to create an application that will run on a server and be able to be configured to run commands at certain times. For instance, there will be a web interface allowing a user to set an engage time and a disengage time. Once those values have been saved by the user I need for the server to be able to fire off those commands precisely at the time specified each day.
I would also need to be able to set single use non recurring events that would occur... maybe 10 minutes from the time an event was triggered and have a command fired off when that 10 minute timer goes off.
I've already got a class library written that has the engage and disengage commands exposed. I would hope to be able to integrate this into whatever solution I end up with and simply be able to make calls directly to the class. Alternatively I could also compile the class library into an executable and have commands issued to it via command line. I'm hoping to not have to do the latter.
I've never written anything like this before. I've peeked a bit at Windows Services, but there is a lot of chatter out there saying that it isn't necessarily the best option. Can someone please guide me in the right direction please?
A windows service is not a bad idea, its perfect for this kind of application. Unless you end up using standard windows scheduled tasks as the trigger for your command, you need some sort of process that is always running to contain your scheduler. A windows service is an excellent candidate for this.
Using a windows service in conjunction with Quartz.NET and some sort of persistence layer so you can store your schedules (in case you need to restart the service or it crashes etc) would be a good way to go.
Alternatively, you could write an application that just adds and removes windows scheduled tasks, but considering you have existing class libraries, using Quartz.NET will fit in well with your existing libraries.
easiest solution:
make a console exe and run under scheduled task in windows.
Let web page to accept user input and modify a configuration file.
I have a clockIn & clockOut module that records start time & end time for workers from an Asp.NET app.
I want to ask how to do cron job for asp.net application to see if a worker has not entered their time on that date or week and send an email notification to remind them to enter start time and end time.
ASP.NET is the wrong tool for the job. You would be better off either writing a Console Application that is run on a scheduled task, or a Windows Service that polls on a regular interval. ASP.NET is purely meant for a request/response model.
Either one can access whatever data store the website is reading from/writing to just as easily as the ASP.NET site can.
If you've done neither, the Console Application is by far the simplest to write and implement. Windows Services aren't all that bad, but involve extra overhead, including difficulty debugging, and the need to go through a special installation process as compared to the XCOPY deployment model possible with Console applications.
If you REALLY want to do it in ASP.NET, you can write an asp.net web page that does this, and use the Windows Scheduled Task to run it. The Scheduled Task can open up Internet Explorer to a specific page just as easily as it can run any executable. But I wouldn't recommend it. You'll forever have to close the IE window when the task is finished, and it's just really a "hackish" solution. I did it back when I was a pure web developer and didn't know any better, but not since.
Jeff Atwood posted on the Stack Overflow blog, titled as Easy Background Tasks in ASP.NET, in the early days of this site about a simple way to do background tasks in ASP.NET. If your tasks are relatively lightweight, this might not be a bad way. If you have a reason to really want to keep everything inside an existing ASP.NET app, this might be the way to go.
The gist:
At startup, add an item to the HttpRuntime.Cache with a fixed expiration.
When cache item expires, do your work, such as WebRequest or what have you.
Re-add the item to the cache with a fixed expiration.
Although its not technically a cron job, from within a website you can get the website to call a set page at X time of the day.
I have done this a few times via a web method call, which is called on the timer from the application start.
Basic explanation is here:
Call a webpage from c# in code
First of all sorry of asking such a dumb question, I am quite a newbie in asp.net.
So, I am supposed to do something periodically, say I am owner of site heartpatients.com (hypothetically) and I want that for each of my site user who visits the site, a message to be shown after 2hrs "Take your pills". so, basically this is all my question, how am I supposed to show this message after every 2hr (or 4, 6 whatever time)after, also how can I customize time.
One more thing, say if I have this method in a WCF service, that shows this message, how can I call that service at a particular time, and that even configured by user (say someone is taking pills after 10hrs?) So how to call that service (that particular method in service) after the time specified by user passes periodically?
I hope I made my question quite clear.
Any help is appreciated.
ASP.NET generally isn't suited as a task scheduler. The nature of the web is as a request/response system. So a web application should just sit and wait for a request, generate a response, and be done.
For any kind of back-end scheduled task, I'd recommend either:
A Windows Service
A console application scheduled to run (I think Windows comes with a task scheduler)
There are pros and cons either way. For example, a Windows Service will run from boot time and has no console UI, and is generally very manageable from a server perspective. While a console application is traditionally simpler to write and debug.
These can still share code from your web application. If your business logic and data access and all that good stuff are in their own projects/assemblies then these other applications can use those assemblies just as well. (Of course, if everything in your web application is UI-bound, that's another question entirely.)
What concerns me the most is... How do you plan to show this message to a user? Is the user just sitting on your website for hours at a time and you need to remind them to take their meds? Or do you plan to send an email or something? Maybe the example you gave doesn't really explain what you're trying to do? I'm not sure.
Running tasks in the background is one thing, but it seems to me that an entire half of your overall equation (displaying a message to the user) is sort of glazed over and not really thought through.
Check out Quartz.Net: http://quartznet.sourceforge.net/
It enables you to schedule tasks to run using cron expressions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron