ASP.NET to call my method every hour

Wednesday, January 31, 2018 by Nate Bross

Someone asked on Stack Overflow:

I want to send email remainder. I created a method that will send emails to the users that have an appointment in the next hour. Right now i have to call my method manually. But i want to use HangFire( or if you have a better suggestion) to call my method every hour( 3:00 PM, 4:00 PM, and so on). I don’t want to use Windows task scheduler because i won’t have access to the server in the future.

  //[HttpPost("lll/reminder")]
    public IActionResult EventReminder()
    {
        var date = DateTime.Now;
        var events = eventRepository.GetEventsByDateTimeNow();
        foreach(Event evnt in events)
        {
            var usr = userRepository.GetUserById(evnt.AttendeeId);

            var message = new MimeMessage();
            message.From.Add(new MailboxAddress("", ""));
            message.To.Add(new MailboxAddress("User", usr.Email));
            message.Subject = "Remainder";
            message.Body = new TextPart("html")
            {
                Text = "message"

            };
            using (var client = new SmtpClient())
            {
                client.Connect("smtp.gmail.com", 587, false);
                client.Authenticate("", "");

                client.Send(message);

                client.Disconnect(true);
            }               
        }
        return Ok();
    }

This is the method. It’s working but i have to call it manually. So, any ideas?

I posted the following answer, which was chosen as the accepted answer and received 2 upvotes:

As you’ve already mentioned, HangFire can help you with this. They have several examples directly on their home page. The one you want is probably the ‘recurring job’:

Recurring jobs

Recurring jobs fire many times on the specified CRON schedule.

RecurringJob.AddOrUpdate(
    () => Console.WriteLine("Recurring!"),
    Cron.Daily);

You can setup and configure hangfire a variety of ways, but the most simple is to simply add it to your Startup.cs file.

I’d recommend you follow the quick start guide, since your use case appears fairly straight forward, running the ‘server’ in the web app is probably good enough for many small sites/apps and use cases.

There are ways to help improve running the server in the web app itself. That said, if you need something extremely robust, setting up the ‘server’ as a Windows Service or other ‘out of process’ process is probably time well spent and something hangfire easily supports as well.

Originally posted on Stack Overflow — 2 upvotes (accepted answer). Licensed under CC BY-SA.