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

Careful here because I think you are confusing the retry feature with the automatic Complete/Abandon mechanism for the OnMessage event-driven message handling. The built in retry mechanism comes into play when a call to the Service Bus fails. For example, if you call to set a message as complete and that fails, then the retry mechanism would kick in. If you are processing a message an exception occurs in your own code that will NOT trigger a retry through the retry feature. Your question doesn't get explicit on if the error is from your code or when attempting to contact the service bus.

If you are indeed after modifying the retry policy that occurs when an error occurs attempting to communicate with the service bus you can modify the RetryPolicy that is set on the MessageReciver itself. There is an RetryExponitial which is used by default, as well as an abstract RetryPolicy you can create your own from.

What I think you are after is more control over what happens when you get an exception doing your processing, and you want to push off working on that message. There are a few options:

When you create your message handler you can set up OnMessageOptions. One of the properties is "AutoComplete". By default this is set to true, which means as soon as processing for the message is completed the Complete method is called automatically. If an exception occurs then abandon is automatically called, which is what you are seeing. By setting the AutoComplete to false you required to call Complete on your own from within the message handler. Failing to do so will cause the message lock to eventually run out, which is one of the behaviors you are looking for.

So, you could write your handler so that if an exception occurs during your processing you simply do not call Complete. The message would then remain on the queue until it's lock runs out and then would become available again. The standard dead lettering mechanism applies and after x number of tries it will be put into the deadletter queue automatically.

A caution of handling this way is that any type of exception will be treated this way. You really need to think about what types of exceptions are doing this and if you really want to push off processing or not. For example, if you are calling a third party system during your processing and it gives you an exception you know is transient, great. If, however, it gives you an error that you know will be a big problem then you may decide to do something else in the system besides just bailing on the message.

You could also look at the "Defer" method. This method actually will then not allow that message to be processed off the queue unless it is specifically pulled by its sequence number. You're code would have to remember the sequence number value and pull it. This isn't quite what you described though.

Another option is you can move away from the OnMessage, Event-driven style of processing messages. While this is very helpful you don't get a lot of control over things. Instead hook up your own processing loop and handle the abandon/complete on your own. You'll also need to deal some of the threading/concurrent call management that the OnMessage pattern gives you. This can be more work but you have the ultimate in flexibility.

Finally, I believe the reason the call you made to AbandonAsync passing the properties you wanted to modify didn't work is that those properties are referring to Metadata properties on the method, not standard properties on BrokeredMessage.