In ASP.NET Core 3.1, how can I schedule a background task (Cron Jobs) with hosted services for a specific date and time in the future?

Question

I am working on a project based on ASP.NET Core 3.1 and I want to add a specific functionality to it to schedule publishing a post in the future in a date and time specified by post author (something like what Wordpress does for scheduled posts through its cron jobs). For example, if we receive this date and time from user :

2020-09-07 14:08:07

Then, how can I schedule a background task for it by using hosted services to run only for one time and to change a flag in database and save changes after that?

I've read some articles about it but they didn't specify date and time and just mentioned repeated tasks for every 5 second and stuff like that with cron expressions, but, the thing I need to know is how can I schedule a background task for a specific date and time?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

I combined CrontabSchedule with IHostedService. The implementation below is lightweight (no architecture imposing libs) and no polling.

public class SomeScheduledService: IHostedService
{
    private readonly CrontabSchedule _crontabSchedule;
    private DateTime _nextRun;
    private const string Schedule = "0 0 1 * * *"; // run day at 1 am
    private readonly SomeTask _task;

    public SomeScheduledService(SomeTask task)
    {
        _task = Task;
        _crontabSchedule = CrontabSchedule.Parse(Schedule, new CrontabSchedule.ParseOptions{IncludingSeconds = true});
        _nextRun = _crontabSchedule.GetNextOccurrence(DateTime.Now);
    }

    public Task StartAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        Task.Run(async () =>
        {
            while (!cancellationToken.IsCancellationRequested)
            {
                await Task.Delay(UntilNextExecution(), cancellationToken); // wait until next time

                await _task.Execute(); //execute some task

                _nextRun = _crontabSchedule.GetNextOccurrence(DateTime.Now);
            }
        }, cancellationToken);

        return Task.CompletedTask;
    }

    private int UntilNextExecution() => Math.Max(0, (int)_nextRun.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalMilliseconds);

    public Task StopAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken) => Task.CompletedTask;
}