Quartz.Net GUI Tour - Part 2

This is the second part of the Quartz.Net GUI Tour. The first part of the tour covered connecting to schedulers and adding jobs. In this post, I’ll go over the remaining features.

Running Jobs

To run a job immediately, select the job from the left tree. The job details will be displayed on the right, and the run button will be enabled, as in the attached screenshot:
image
Clicking on the button will cause the job to be scheduled to execute once, immediately.

Deleting Jobs

To delete a job, select it from the left tree. The delete button will then become enabled. Click the delete button on the right to delete the job and all of its associated triggers.
image

Pausing and Resuming Triggers

Quartz.Net manager allows you to pause and resume triggers as well. To enable the pause / resume button, you must first select a trigger from the tree on the left. Once a trigger is selected, the pause button will be enabled. Click on the pause button to pause a trigger. If the trigger you selected is already paused, the button will say Resume instead of Pause. Click on the resume button to reactivate the selected trigger.
image

Backup To File

The last feature we’ll discuss in the tour is the backup to file feature. This feature lets you backup all of your jobs and triggers to a text (xml) file. This file can be then be used by the xml plugin to load all the job information into, say, a new scheduler instance. To create a backup of your scheduler, right click on the entry for the scheduler in the tree. Select the backup option and enter a file name for your backup file.
This concludes the quick tour of the Quartz.Net manager features. I hope you have found it useful.

Continue Reading

Quartz.Net GUI Tour

In this post I will do a quick walkthrough of the Quartz.Net GUI that we open sourced last week.

Installation

We do not have an installer right now, so your options are:
  1. 1. Download the source code and hit F5.
  2. 2. After having downloaded the source code and done a successful build, run the executable.
  3. 3. Download the binaries, extract them into a folder and run the executable.

Connecting to a Scheduler

Click on Scheduler –> Connect. You should get the following connection dialog:
image
Type in your server name, and change any of the default connection information if necessary. Once connected, your screen should look something like this:
image

Adding Custom Jobs to the Manager

Before we can add a custom job, we must first tell the application which dlls contain the jobs that we want to add. Adding dlls to the list of scanned dlls is done by editing the JobAssemblies.txt file. Just include the name of your dll in the file, by adding it to the bottom of the list.

Adding a Job to the Scheduler

To add or schedule a job on the scheduler that you are connected to, click on the Jobs –> Add menu. You should get a dialog box like this:
image
Now, select a job type from the dropdown and fill out all the boxes with the necessary information. You do not need to add job data unless your job requires it. If your job requires job data to be set, use the right hand side of the dialog to add as many key value pairs of data as needed.
Once you have set up your data, click on add and your job will be scheduled. The dialog will close and the Scheduler objects pane will show the job that you scheduled.

What About the Run, Pause, Delete and Edit Buttons?

Part 2 of the tour is now available, with a quick description on how to use these buttons.

Continue Reading

Open Source Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Quartz.Net

Click Forensics, the company I work for, has graciously allowed me to open source the code to a GUI for Quartz.net. The latest code is currently available on github.  We have been using Quartz.net for over a year and we use this tool to manage our schedulers. The application is written in C#, using windows forms and is targeting .Net 4.0
The code should be considered alpha quality at this point, as some features are missing and some don’t work properly. The documentation is pretty much non-existent at this point, but as I have some spare time I will post updates here and on github. Please give it a try send us any feedback you might have.
I would suggest you download the source and build it yourself, but for your convenience, you can download the binaries from https://github.com/adometry/QuartzNetManager/downloads.

Continue Reading

Creating a Quartz.Net JobListener

This post will describe how to create a Quartz.Net job listener. As an example, we will write a job history listener that will log job start and end times to a database.

Creating the Job Listener

To create a job listener, we need to implement the IJobListener interface. Here is the interface:
public interface IJobListener
{
    string Name { get; }
    void JobExecutionVetoed(JobExecutionContext context);
    void JobToBeExecuted(JobExecutionContext context);
    void JobWasExecuted(JobExecutionContext context, JobExecutionException jobException);
}


For the task at hand, we will not implement JobExecutionVetoed, since we just want to be notified when a job starts and when it ends. Since we want to log start and end times for our jobs, we will focus on implementing the JobToBeExecuted and the JobWasExecuted methods.


Implementing the JobToBeExecuted Method



In this method, we will write a record to the database, indicating that the job has started processing. Your implementation of the method could look something like this:


Guid historyId = Guid.NewGuid();
context.JobDetail.JobDataMap.Add("historyID", historyId);
string sql = @"INSERT INTO [dbo].[QRTZ_JOB_HISTORY]([JobHistoryID],[JobName],[StartDate],[Server],[JobType]) VALUES(@JobHistoryID,@JobName,@StartDate,@Server,@JobType)";
using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionStringGoesHere)
{
   connection.Open();
   using (SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand(sql, connection))
   {
       command.Parameters.AddWithValue("@JobHistoryID", historyId);
       command.Parameters.AddWithValue("@JobName", context.JobDetail.Name);
       command.Parameters.AddWithValue("@StartDate", DateTime.Now);
       command.Parameters.AddWithValue("@Server", Environment.MachineName);
       command.Parameters.AddWithValue("@JobType", context.JobDetail.JobType.ToString());
       command.ExecuteNonQuery();
   }
}


Basically we are inserting a row into a table with all the information we need in order to be able to determine the job’s run time. One thing you should note is that we are creating a GUID and sticking it into the context. This is so that we can record when the job finishes running.


Implementing the JobWasExecuted Method



This method gets called whenever the job finishes running. The only thing left to do now is to update the row we inserted when the job began running and set the end time. Here is what that method might look like:


string sql = "UPDATE [dbo].[QRTZ_JOB_HISTORY] SET [EndDate]=@EndDate WHERE [JobHistoryID]=@JobHistoryID";
using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionStringGoesHere))
{
   connection.Open();
   using (SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand(sql, connection))
   {
       command.Parameters.AddWithValue("@JobHistoryID", (Guid)jobDetail.JobDataMap.Get("historyID"));
       command.Parameters.AddWithValue("@EndDate", DateTime.Now);
       command.ExecuteNonQuery();
   }
}


As you can see here, we are reaching into the context and extracting the GUID that we put there when the job started running. This will allow us to update the correct row and thus be able to calculate how long it took the job to finish running.


Wrapping Up



Now that you have written a job listener. You have a couple of choices:



  1. You can add the listener directly to your job, in which case only jobs that have the listener attached will log their execution in our database.


  2. Add the listener as a global listener. Global listeners get called whenever any job runs, and our history listener seems like a good candidate for becoming a global listener. My previous post describes how to schedule a global listener.


I hope this post was useful.

Continue Reading

Creating A Quartz.Net Plug-in

In this post I’ll walk you through creating and configuring a Quartz.Net plug-in. It’s not very complicated, but this will depend on what you are trying to do with your plug-in. For the example we will create a plug-in that attaches a global job listener to the quartz scheduler. This will come in handy later on, since I will be posting another article describing how to create a job listener for Quartz.Net. The Quartz.net source code also includes an example of how to do this in the LoggingJobHistoryPlugin.
Why do we need to create a plug-in to register a global job listener? Global job listeners are not stored in the job store, so they need to be added to the scheduler every time it starts. That’s why we’re going with the global job listener / plug-in combo.

The Plug-in Interface

To create the plug-in we need to implement the ISchedulerPlugin interface. Here is the ISchedulerPlugin interface:
public interface ISchedulerPlugin
{
    void Initialize(string pluginName, IScheduler sched);
    void Start();
    void Shutdown();
}


This interface has 3 methods that we could implement. Let’s look at these methods in a little more detail.


The Initialize method



The comments in the code say that this method is “Called during creation of the IScheduler in order to give the ISchedulerPlugin a chance to initialize. At this point, the Scheduler's IJobStore is not yet (ready?). If you need direct access (to) your plug-in, you can have it explicitly put a reference to itself in the IScheduler's SchedulerContext Initialize(string, IScheduler) method”. We’re just adding a global listener to the scheduler, so we’ll include the code to do this in the Initialize method. Alternatively, we could move this code to the Start method and the result would be the same.


The Start Method



The comments in the code say that this method is called when the associated IScheduler is started, in order to let the plug-in know it can now make calls into the scheduler if it needs to. We’re not going to be making any calls into the scheduler, so there is no need to implement this method.


The Shutdown Method



For this method the code comments say that it is called in order to inform the ISchedulerPlugin that it should free up all of it's resources because the scheduler is shutting down. We don’t have any resources to free up, so we aren’t going to implement this method either.


Creating the Plug-In



Now, let’s take a look at the code for the plug-in. We’re doing something pretty simple here, so the implementation is very short.


public void Initialize(string pluginName, IScheduler sched)
{
    sched.AddGlobalJobListener(new JobListener());
}


Yes, that’s all there is to creating a very simple plug-in. We’re not entirely done though, since now we need to tell the scheduler to load the load the plug-in upon startup.


Configuring the Scheduler to Load the Plug-In



The last step is to let the scheduler know that it needs to load your plug-in upon start. This is done via the configuration file, by setting a property as follows:



quartz.plugin.{name}.type = {type name}, {assembly name}



Let’s look at all the components of this property in detail. First there is quartz.plugin, which tells the scheduler that this is a plug-in that needs to be loaded. The {name} portion is the name that you want to give to your plug-in, and is the name that is passed in to the Initialize method above. The value of the property indicates the Type of the plug-in, so that the scheduler can load it into memory. {type name} is the full name of your plug-in, which in our case would be something.something.JobListener. {assembly name} is the name of your assembly file, minus the .dll extension.


Once you add your configuration information, you are done. Make sure that your dll is in the same folder as the Quartz.Net binaries and that should be all you need to do.


In my next post we’ll tackle the implementation of the JobListener that we used as an example in this post.

Continue Reading