How to schedule a task in service fabric using 'Ac­tor Remin­der' mechanism?

Question

I want to generate invoices on daily, weekly and monthly basis and want to send invoices periodically. Each customer have different invoice settings.

Answer 1

Sometime ago I wondered how to do that myself. Based on the excellent documentation I came up with a sample app, see my repo.

Your actor should implement the IRemindable interface. To create a reminder use this in an actor method:

await RegisterReminderAsync(
            "MyReminder", // name of the reminder
            Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(message), // byte array with payload (message is a string in my case)
            dueTime, // When is the reminder first activated
            snoozeTime); // Interval between activations

In your case set the snoozeTime to a day or to a week to have the reminder activate every period.

When the due time is there the method ReceiveReminderAsync is called:

public Task ReceiveReminderAsync(string reminderName, byte[] state, TimeSpan dueTime, TimeSpan period)
{
    ActorEventSource.Current.Message($"Actor recieved reminder {reminderName}.");

    ...
}

You can tell by the value of ReceiveReminderAsync which reminder it is about and you can use the content of state to act on the payload.

To dismiss a reminder use the UnregisterReminderAsync method:

await UnregisterReminderAsync(GetReminder("MyReminder"));