Equivalent of Ihostedservice in asp.net framework for background tasks

Question

I have a restful micro service (web api) in .net 4.6.2 and I want to call a fire and forget function each time after certain endpoints are called to do some database cleanup wor

Answer 1

I guess it's a bit too late, but for someone with the same issue..

Do you know Quartz.NET and Hangfire.io ?

Maybe one of those both could be a very useful tool in your situation. I used it in many applications, and never had any issue.

For example, in Quartz.Net, you first have to create a "job" (it's the term used for this kind of background services) by creating a class implementing IJob interface:

public class HelloJob : IJob
{
    public async Task Execute(IJobExecutionContext context)
    {
        await Console.Out.WriteLineAsync("Greetings from HelloJob!");
    }
}

Then, you have to define when you want to check that job, there are many ways (CRON for example) but we just gonna use a simple schedule here :

        StdSchedulerFactory factory = new StdSchedulerFactory();
        IScheduler scheduler = await factory.GetScheduler();

        await scheduler.Start();

        // define the job
        IJobDetail job = JobBuilder.Create()
            .WithIdentity("job1", "group1")
            .Build();

        // Trigger the job to run now, and then repeat every 20 seconds
        ITrigger trigger = TriggerBuilder.Create()
            .WithIdentity("trigger1", "group1")
            .StartNow()
            .WithSimpleSchedule(x => x
                .WithIntervalInSeconds(20)
                .RepeatForever())
            .Build();

        // Tell quartz to schedule the job using our trigger, DON'T FORGET THIS ONE
        await scheduler.ScheduleJob(job, trigger);

You are in a micro services architecture based on windows service. You should be able to catch all "graceful" shutdown of your application. In these cases, you have to shutdown properly the Quartz scheduler :

await scheduler.Shutdown();

I personally really like these kinds of approach. It's reusable (you just have to schedule a new job here) and easy to get into that for any developer on your team.

I hope it will help you a bit with your issue.