Monday, June 6, 2011

Implementing a Plugin in Quartz.Net 2.0

NOTE: I'm now blogging at http://jayvilalta.com/blog and not updating this blog anymore. For information on the latest version of Quartz.Net, visit me there.

Today we will implement a plugin for Quartz.Net 2.0. If you’re looking for a way to implement a plugin for version 1.0 of Quartz.Net, take a look at this post. Most of the steps are the same, but there are some API changes, so the plugin isn’t exactly the same, as you will see.
What are plugins used for in Quartz.Net 2.0? Well, plugins come in handy if there is something you want to do whenever the scheduler is started or stopped. Some examples of handy plugins are:
  • plugins to load jobs into a RAM jobstore upon scheduler startup (this one is available out of the box)
  • plugins to register listeners (listeners must be registered with the scheduler upon startup since they are not persisted)
In order to implement a listener in Quartz.Net 2.0 there are several steps we need to take. First we must implement the ISchedulerPlugin interface and then we must configure the scheduler to load our plugin. Let’s get started.

Implementing the ISchedulerPlugin Interface

In order to create your own plugin, you have to implement the ISchedulerPlugin interface. Here is the ISchedulerPlugin interface definition:
public interface ISchedulerPlugin
 {
    void Initialize(string pluginName, IScheduler sched);
    void Start();
    void Shutdown();
 }



As you can see it’s not a very complicated interface. Let’s take some time to look at these methods in a little more detail.


Initialize


The Initialize method is called before the scheduler is started and it gives your plugin a chance to initialize itself. Keep in mind that at this point the scheduler itself is not running nor fully initialized. Here is what the code comments have to say:



Called during creation of the IScheduler in order to give the ISchedulerPlugin a chance to Initialize. At this point, the Scheduler's IJobStore is not yet (initialized?). If you need direct access (to) your plugin, you can have it explicitly put a reference to itself in the IScheduler’s SchedulerContext (in the) Initialize(string, IScheduler) method.


Start


The Start method is probably the method where most of the logic for your plugin will go. I will let the method’s comments describe the method’s purpose:


Called when the associated IScheduler is started, in order to let the plugin know it can now make calls into the scheduler if it needs to.


Shutdown


The shutdown method is there to allow you to do any cleanup that might be necessary for your plugin. The code comments are as follows:



Called in order to inform the ISchedulerPlugin that it should free up all of it's resources because the scheduler is shutting down.


Sample Implementation



Now we will go ahead and actually implement the plugin. In our sample implementation all that our plugin will do is to register a job listener. We are following the same approach we took while discussing how to implement a plugin in version 1.0 of Quartz.Net. This is intentional, to allow you see what the differences are between the two versions.


The implementation of our plugin is still very simple, albeit a little different from the one on the previous post:




public class PluginExample : ISchedulerPlugin
 {
    public void Initialize(string pluginName, IScheduler sched)
    {
        sched.ListenerManager.AddJobListener(new JobListenerExample(), EverythingMatcher<JobKey>.AllJobs());
    }

    public void Shutdown()
    {
        //Do Nothing
    }

    public void Start()
    {
        //Do Nothing
    }
 }



Configuring the Scheduler to Load the Plugin



Now that we have created our plugin, the next step is to tell the scheduler to load it. This is done by adding this line to our properties file :

quartz.plugin.myplugin.type = Examples.PluginExample, Examples



The plugin property needs to be structured like this:


quartz.plugin.{name}.type = {type name}, {assembly name}

Let’s discuss the components of the property. First, the quartz.plugin part of the property tells the scheduler that this is a plugin that needs to be loaded. The {name} part is the name that you want to give to your plug-in, and is the name that is passed in to the Initialize method above. The value of the property {type name}, {assembly name} tells the scheduler the Type of the plug-in, so that it can be loaded into memory. {type name} is the full name of your plugin, which in our case would be Examples.PluginExample. {assembly name} is the name of your assembly file, minus the .dll extension. Here’s another example of a plugin configuration property, lifted from the Quartz.Net default configuration file:


quartz.plugin.xml.type = Quartz.Plugin.Xml.XMLSchedulingDataProcessorPlugin, Quartz


Final Step



Now that your plugin has been added to the configuration, all you need to do is start the scheduler and check the log for errors. Remember that the dll that contains your plugin needs to be in the same folder as the Quartz.Net binaries so that it can be found by the .Net framework and loaded into memory.

5 comments:

Jalal El-Shaer said...

This is off topic but I couldn't find a way to submit an issue on github.

I forked you project https://github.com/lahma/quartznet and tried to build locally. using visual studio, I couldn't find the dll. and using nant build tool , it complains about missing ".snk" key which is not included in the files.

Please take note
Thanks

J said...

Thanks Jalal for your comment. While I have contributed to the project, I am not the maintainer. The honor goes to Marko Lahma. :-) I believe this is expected behavior, as the assembly is signed by default and thus you have to provide your own signature file.

Mocksy01 said...

Hi J,

how would you register a listener now for a particular job not in code. Seems pretty useless that you would do this in code as you would ideally like to attach listeners to particular jobs on the fly rather than having to recompile the app everytime you want to attach/detach a listener.

In the example, it passes the listener name as part of the job data map which seems to be a step backwards considering we used to have

listenername

in earlier versions of quartz...

Thanks
Andrew.

Mocksy01 said...

sorry that should have said
job-listener-ref

in the example

J said...

Hi Andrew

There isn't a way to do this out of the box. You will have to either write a custom job that registers the listener for you or you could write you own xml job loader.

I'm working on the latter but I'm not far enough yet to be able to make it public.