Can the Azure Service Bus be delayed before retrying a message?

Question

The Azure Service Bus supports a built-in retry mechanism which makes an abandoned message immediately visible for another read attempt. I'm trying to use this mechanism to handle some transient errors, but the message is made available immediately after being abandoned.

What I would like to do is make the message invisible for a period of time after it is abandoned, preferably based on an exponentially incrementing policy.

I've tried to set the ScheduledEnqueueTimeUtc property when abandoning the message, but it doesn't seem to have an effect:

var messagingFactory = MessagingFactory.CreateFromConnectionString(...);

var receiver = messagingFactory.CreateMessageReceiver("test-queue");

receiver.OnMessageAsync(async brokeredMessage =>
{
    await brokeredMessage.AbandonAsync(
        new Dictionary<string, object>
        {
            { "ScheduledEnqueueTimeUtc", DateTime.UtcNow.AddSeconds(30) }
        });
    }
});

I've considered not abandoning the message at all and just letting the lock expire, but this would require having some way to influence how the MessageReceiver specifies the lock duration on a message, and I can't find anything in the API to let me change this value. In addition, it wouldn't be possible to read the delivery count of the message (and therefore make a decision for how long to wait for the next retry) until after the lock is already required.

Can the retry policy in the Message Bus be influenced in some way, or can a delay be artificially introduced in some other way?

Answer 1

I actually asked this same question last year (implementation aside) with the three approaches I could think of looking at the API. @ClemensVasters, who works on the SB team, responded that using Defer with some kind of re-receive is really the only way to control this precisely.

You can read my comment to his answer for a specific approach to doing it where I suggest using a secondary queue to store messages that indicate which primary messages have been deferred and need to be re-received from the main queue. Then you can control how long you wait by setting the ScheduledEnqueueTimeUtc on those secondary messages to control exactly how long you wait before you retry.