I was troubleshooting an interesting bug recently thanks to which I’ve learned a bit more about Hangfire.io and expressions in .NET.
The situation was that Hangfire dashboard looked correctly, we had all jobs registered as expected. But what was actually executed by the scheduler for each job was same logic, which was supposed to be executed only for the last job. Nasty bug. We were not yet on production with hangfire.io, but still it was quite an unexpected behavior to see.
Reason was that we were wrapping each job in a class called JobRunner. This class was adding some generic functionality to update UI progress bars when jobs are running. Our code looked like that:
JobRunner runner = new JobRunner(myJobClass); RecurringJob.AddOrUpdate(myJobClass.JobId, () => runner.Execute(), myJobClass.CronExpression);
Crucial thing to understand about Hangfire is that the what we pass to AddOrUpdate method is not a function to execute but an Expression describing the function to be executed. See this thread for difference between Expression<> and Func<>.
runner instance is not kept in memory or serialized. When Hangfire executes the job, it needs to create the instance by calling the constructor of given type. Constructor arguments are resolved from IoC container. In our case constructor argument was of type IJob. This interface was providing properties like JobId or CronExpression. So what was happening when EVERY job was running, was firsts implementation of IJob found in the container injected into a JobRunner. For each job same implementation of IJob was injected. And here we are – all jobs magically are executing same logic…
Now it seems quite obvious but it was necessary to learn couple of rules along the way to understand that behavior. It seems to be a common misunderstanding as there is even a comment about people making that mistake in hangfire.io source code, see Job.cs .
I hope this case study will help someone to avoid similar traps.