Whats is the difference between 'Settings.job' and 'TimerTrigger' in Azure WebJobs SDK 3.0

Question

There are many tutorials using the following code to create a Webjobs via the WebJob SDK 3.0 library. Specifically 'TimerTrigger'

    public void DoSomethingUseful([TimerTrigger("0 */1 * * * *", RunOnStartup = false)] TimerInfo timerInfo, TextWriter log)
    {
        // Act on the DI-ed class:
        string thing = _usefulRepository.GetFoo();
        Console.WriteLine($"{DateTime.Now} - {thing}");
    }

The above example should run this method as a webjob every 1 minute. However this doesn't work.

I have managed to get the webjob to work when including a setting.job file.

setting.job: {  "schedule": "0 */1 * * * *" }

My question is what is the different between these two?

Answer 1

Update:

Please go to the azure webjobs log, then you can see it actually runs as per the timerTrigger defined by SDK(even though the Schedule is n/a, and settings.job is blank, it does not matter):

In short, When using webjob sdk 3.x, you can use TimerTrigger attribute to run the function as per the time you defined. Without using webjobs SDK(like use .zip file or publish a console project from visual studio), you can use setting.job to defined timer instead of TimerTrigger attribute.

1.When you're using webjobs SDK 3.x for timer trigger, you should add this line of code: config.AddTimers(); .

Here are my code using webjobs SDK 3.x(it's a .net core 2.2 console project created in visual studio):

The packages with latest version: Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs / Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Extensions / Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Console

The code in Program.cs:

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var builder = new HostBuilder()
                .ConfigureWebJobs(config =>
                {
                    config.AddTimers();
                    config.AddAzureStorageCoreServices();
                })
                .ConfigureLogging((context, b) =>
                {
                    b.AddConsole();
                }
                )
                 .Build();

            builder.Run();
        }
    }

Then create a new file, like SayHelloWebJob.cs, and code in it:

    public class SayHelloWebJob
    {
        public void ProcessCollateFiles([TimerTrigger("0 */1 * * * *", RunOnStartup = false)]TimerInfo timerInfo,TextWriter writer)
        {
            writer.WriteLine("hi, it is a testing running");
            Console.WriteLine("test");
        }
    }

Note that in the appsettings.json file, add your storage connection string, like below:

{
  "AzureWebJobsStorage": "DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=xxx;AccountKey=xxx;EndpointSuffix=core.windows.net"
}

Then run the project, you can see the function is triggered as per 1 minute:

2.For settings.job, eg. if you're just creating a console project, and does not use the webjobs sdk. Since you're not using webjobs sdk, you cannot use the timerTrigger attribute. At this moment, you can include the settings.job file(in it's property, set "Copy to Output Directory" as "copy if newer") in this project and configure the scheduled timer like you did in your post. After publish as webjob(from visual studio, when publish, select "Webjob run mode" as "run on demand"), it can run as per the schedule you defined in settings.job.