I've hit an issue with creating a timer job on demand from within an event handler. It works fine on my dev machine where the user is also the farm administrator. On the staging server (and production too), this user will be different. Apparently it needs to be a farm admin who creates/updates timer jobs as they have access to the configuration db.
I used a timer job to cope with the notion that many items could be updated at once using the datasheet and if that happened, I wanted an update rollup to take place at a defined period after the edits.
I'm now thinking I may have to set up a recurring timer job instead of a "once" job and within the timer job, check for certain conditions being true before doing any work.
Any suggestions on how I could achieve my desired result of having a rollup function run after any updates, but not after every one?
The previous answer is not correct, or at least not correct for SharePoint 2010. You cannot create job definitions in 2010 in this way even with elevated privileges, as they must be created from central administration. I had a similar problem and this was my finding
this is a blog I wrote about that
I would suggest that you make an event receiver that with a delay of say 10 minutes (timer or thread sleep) and register itself in say web property bag, so that another instance would not run. This could solve the problem.
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spsecurity.runwithelevatedprivileges.aspx to fix the permissions problem.
Related
In Kentico (9) when I run the task "Delete inactive contacts" it never actually runs and the result is always "Rescheduled to delete more contacts in next off-peak period"
I've tried changing the settings to run once a week and I've tried creating a custom IDeleteContacts then setting it to use that custom class, but I always get the same result.
Any ideas?
By default, Kentico runs it's scheduled tasks in the tail of regular web requests. That's fine if you have traffic 24/7. If you don't, then you can run into all kinds of nastyness including the issue you're describing now because scheduled tasks are not executing.
If you're running on a Windows server you can setup a service to trigger scheduled tasks. If that's not an option, you can setup monitoring to hit your site every couple of minutes, for example UptimeRobot or Application Insights. You'll get the added bonus of being notified whenever the site goes down.
If you really need to clean up the EMS contacts because it's getting out of control, you can access the database directly and trigger the same stored procedure that the scheduled task uses. It's called [Proc_OM_Contact_MassDelete] and takes a where clause and a batch size. The where clause is where you specify the delete policy. For example
ContactCreated < GETDATE()-60 AND ([ContactEmail] IS NULL PR [ContactEmail]='')
With this where clause the stored proc would process contacts that were created over 60 days ago and don't have an e-mail address yet.
Please be aware that large volumes of EMS data will require database index tuning for this procedure to run within an acceptable period of time. This is true for EMS in general when your site has a decent amount of traffic.
If the standard Kentico cleanup doesn't work, for example because the database is unable to deal with millions of contacts, we've written a script to purge all EMS data. Use with caution ;)
do you have applied the latest hotfix (9.0.50) on your project? There was a bug when the deletion of inactive contacts took longer than 1 minute, the next run of the "Delete inactive contacts" scheduled task was not set, and the task did not execute again. You can download the package directly from this page: https://devnet.kentico.com/download/hotfixes
The "Delete inactive contacts" scheduled task only runs between 2am and 6am based on the servers time the site is running on. You can see this in the documentation. It only ever deletes a batch of 1000 contacts and never more. If you want to "trick" the site into running the scheduled task more, update the time on the server to 1:58am and restart the site.
I am developing an application using Azure Cloud Service and web api. I would like to allow users that create a consultation session the ability to change the price of that session, however I would like to allow all users 30 days to leave the session before the new price affects the price for all members currently signed up for the session. My first thought is to use queue storage and set the visibility timeout for the 30 day time limit, but this seems like this could grow the queue really fast over time, especially if the message should not run for 30 days; not to mention the ordering issues. I am looking at the task scheduler as well but the session pricing changes are not a recurring concept but more random. Is the queue idea a good approach or is there a better and more efficient way to accomplish this?
The stuff you are trying to do should be done with a relational database. You can use timestamps to record when prices for session changed. I wouldn't use a queue at all for this. A queue is more for passing messages in a distributed system. Your problem is just about tracking what prices changed on what sessions and when. That data should be modeled in a database.
I think this scenario is more suitable to use Azure Scheduler. Programatically create a Job with one time recurrence with set date as 30 days later to run once. Once this job gets triggered automatically by scheduler, assign an action to callback to one of your API/Service to do the price & other required updates and also remove this Job from the scheduler as part of this action to have a clean jobs list. Anyways premium plan of Azure Scheduler Job Collection will give you unlimited number of jobs to run.
Hope this is exactly what you were looking for...
I would consider using Azure WebJobs. A WebJob basically gives you the ability to run a .NET console application within the context of an Azure Web App. It can be run on demand, continuously, or in response to a reoccurring schedule. If your processing requirements are low and allow for it they can also run in the same process that your Web App is running in to save you $$$ as they are free that way.
You could schedule the WebJob to run once or twice per day and examine the situation and react as is appropriate. Since it's really just a .NET worker role you have ultimate flexibility.
Is it possible to check whether a SharePoint (actually WSS 3.0) timer job has run when it was scheduled to ?
Reason is we have a few daily custom jobs and want to make sure they're always run, even if the server has been down during the time slot for the jobs to run, so I'd like to check them and then run them
And is it possible to add a setting when creating them similar to the one for standard Windows scheduled tasks ... "Run task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed" ?
check it in job status page and then you can look at the logs in 12 hive folder for further details
central administration/operations/monitoring/timer jobs/check jobs status
As far as the job restart is concerned when it is missed that would not be possible with OOTB features. and it make sense as well since there are lot of jobs which are executed at particular interval if everything starts at the same time load on server would be very high
You can look at the LastRunTime property of an SPJobDefinition to see when the job was actually executed. As far as I can see in Reflector, the value of this property is loaded from the database and hence it should reflect the time it was actually executed.
I have a timer job which has been deployed to a server with multiple Web front ends.
This timer job reads it's configuration from a Hierarchical Object Store.
This timer job is scheduled to run daily on the server.
But the problem is that this timer job is not getting invoked daily. I have implemented event logging in the timer job's Execute() method, but I dont see any logs being generated.
Any ideas as to what could cause a timer job to be not picked up for execution by the SharePoint Timer Service? How can I troubleshoot this problem?
Are there any "gotcha"s for running timer jobs in servers from multiple front ends? Will the timer job get execute in all the web front ends, or any one of them arbitarily? How to know which machine will have my event logs?
This might be a stupid question, but does having multiple front ends for load balancing affect the way Hierarchical Object Stores behave?
EDIT:
One of the commenters, Sean McDounough, (Thanks Sean!! ) made a very good point that:
"whether or not the timer job runs on all WFEs will be a function of the SPJobLockType enum value you specified in the constructor. Using a value of "None" means that the job will run on all WFEs."
Now, my timer job is responsible for sending periodic mails to a list of users. Currently it is marked as SPJobLockType.Job"
If I change this to SPJobLockType.None, does this mean that my timer job will be executed in all the WFEs separately? (THis is not desired, it will spam all the users with multiple emails)
Or does it mean that the timer job will execute in any one of the WFEs, arbitarily?
Try restarting the SharePoint timer service from the command-line using NET STOP SPTIMERV3 followed by a NET START SPTIMERV3. My guess is that the timer service is running with an older version of your .NET assembly. The timer service does not automatically reload assemblies when you upgrade the WSP solution.
To do this, follow these steps:
Stop the Timer service.
Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
Right-click Windows SharePoint Services Timer, and then click Stop, or Restart service.
This URL helped me.
We have an SP timer job that was running fine for quite a while. Recently the admins enlisted another server into the farm, and consequently SharePoint decided to start running this timer job on this other server. The problem is the server does not have all the dependencies installed (i.e., Oracle) on it and so the job is failing. I'm just looking for the path of least resistance here. My question is there a way to force a timer job to run on the server you want it to?
[Edit]
If I can do it through code that works for me. I just need to know what the API is to do this if one does exist.
I apologize if I'm pushing for the obvious; I just haven't seen anyone drill down on it yet.
Constraining a custom timer job (that is, your own timer job class that derives from SPJobDefinition) is done by controlling constructor parameters.
Timer jobs typically run on the server where they are submitted (as indicated by vinny) assuming no target server is specified during the creation of the timer job. The two overloaded constructors for the SPJobDefinition type, though, accept an SPServer and an SPJobLockType as the third and fourth parameters, respectively. Using these two parameters properly will allow you to dictate where your job runs.
By specifying your target server as the SPServer and an SPJobLockType of "Job," you can constrain the timer job instance you create to run on the server of your choice.
For documentation on what I've described, see MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spjobdefinition.spjobdefinition.aspx.
I don't know anything about the code you're running, but custom timer jobs are commonly setup during Feature activation. I got the sense that your codebase might not be your own (?); if so, you might want to look for the one or more types/classes that derive from SPFeatureReceiver. In the FeatureActivated method of such classes is where you might find the code that actually carries out the timer job instantiation.
Of course, you'll also want to look at the custom timer job class (or classes) themselves to see how they're being instantiated. Sometimes developers will build the instantiation of the class into the class itself (via Factory Method pattern, for example). Between the timer job class and SPFeatureReceiver implementations, though, you should be on the way towards finding what needs to change.
I hope that helps!
Servers in a farm need to be identical.
If you happen to use VMs for your web front ends, you can snap a server and provision copies so that you know they are all identical.
Timer jobs per definition run on all web front ends.
If you need scheduled logic to run on a specific server, you either need to specifically code this in the timer job, or to use a "standard" NT Service instead.
I think a side effect of setting SPJobLockType to 'Job' is that it'll execute on the server where the job is submitted.
You could implement a Web Service with the business logig and deploy that Web Service to one machine. Then your Timer Job could trigger your web service periodically.
The it sould be not that important wher your timer job is running. SharePoint decides itself where to run the timer job.