Getting Started with OWIN

This article describes how you can use OWIN version of CrystalQuartz to plug Quartz.NET Scheduler viewer into your application.

Pre-requirements

It is assumed that you already have an OWIN application up and running. That application can be either web or console acting as a self-host for OWIN pipeline. The only thing that is required is having an instance of IAppBuilder object available. For web applications it is in Startup.cs file and for console app it is exactly where you running the WebServer.

Typical entry point for OWIN web-application Typical entry point for self-hosted OWIN application
Startup.cs
public partial class Startup
{
    public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
    {
        // CrystalQuartz will be configured here
    }
}
Program.cs
class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        WebApp.Start(
            "http://localhost:3000", 
            (IAppBuilder app) => {
                // CrystalQuartz will be configured here
            });
    }
}

It is also assumed you have Quartz.NET v2 or v3 installed and the scheduler instance available.

1 Setup

As a first step, you need to install CrystalQuartz.Owin NuGet package to the target project:

Install-Package CrystalQuartz.Owin

That will add a CrystalQuartz.Owin.dll reference to your project. The CrystalQuartz.Owin.dll is a single dll that contains all the resources needed for CrystalQuartz to work.

2 Configuration

As a next step, you need to hook CrystalQuartz middleware into your OWIN pipeline. It should be done by calling UseCrystalQuartz extension method at the moment of the pipeline initialization.

Make sure to add the using statement at the top of the entry point file.

using CrystalQuartz.Owin;

The generic syntax for panel configuration should be placed in the entry point method:

/*
 * app is your IAppBuilder instance
 */
app.UseCrystalQuartz(schedulerProvider, options);

The arguments are:

  • schedulerOrProvider is a provider pointing to the scheduler instance;
  • options is an optional object for panel customization.

2.1 Configuration - Scheduler

This section describes different ways of passing schedulerProvider argument to the UseCrystalQuartz method. You need to pick one of these options.

2.1.1 Scheduler provider

If you already have an IScheduler object instance then you can pass a Func pointing to it to the configuration extension method:

public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
{
    IScheduler scheduler = CreateScheduler();

    /*
     * Init CrystalQuartz Panel with scheduler instance.
     */
    app.UseCrystalQuartz(() => scheduler);
}

private IScheduler CreateScheduler() 
{
    IScheduler scheduler = StdSchedulerFactory.GetDefaultScheduler();
    
    // define the job and tie it to our HelloJob class
    IJobDetail job = JobBuilder.Create<HelloJob>()
        .WithIdentity("job1", "group1")
        .Build();

    // Trigger the job to run now, and then repeat every 10 seconds
    ITrigger trigger = TriggerBuilder.Create()
        .WithIdentity("trigger1", "group1")
        .StartNow()
        .WithSimpleSchedule(x => x
        .WithIntervalInSeconds(10)
        .RepeatForever())
        .Build();

    // Tell quartz to schedule the job using our trigger
    scheduler.ScheduleJob(job, trigger);

    scheduler.Start();
    
    return scheduler;
}

Using this technique you can manually configure panel to work with a remote scheduler:

public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
{
    string url = "tcp://localhost:555/QuartzScheduler"; // YOUR URL HERE

    NameValueCollection properties = new NameValueCollection();
    properties["quartz.scheduler.proxy"] = "true";
    properties["quartz.scheduler.proxy.address"] = url; 

    ISchedulerFactory schedulerFactory = new StdSchedulerFactory(properties);
    IScheduler scheduler = schedulerFactory.GetScheduler();

    /*
     * Init CrystalQuartz Panel with Remote scheduler instance.
     */
    app.UseCrystalQuartz(() => scheduler);
}

You can get it from an IoC container:

public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
{
    /* ... */
    
    /* 
     * Make sure your scheduler is configured
     * as singleton in the IoC container 
     */
    app.UseCrystalQuartz(() => container.Resolve<IScheduler>());
}

2.1.2 Legacy Scheduler provider

Non-OWIN version of CrystalQuartz Panel uses internal ISchedulerProvider abstraction for getting access to the scheduler instance. You can pass an instance of ISchedulerProvider as a first argument of UseCrystalQuartz call. That might be helpful in some rare cases.

If you are migrating from CrystalQuartz.Simple to CrystalQuartz.Owin and you already have your custom implementation of ISchedulerProvider: 

public class MySchedulerProvider : ISchedulerProvider
{
    public object CreateScheduler(ISchedulerEngine engine)
    {
        IScheduler scheduler = StdSchedulerFactory.GetDefaultScheduler();
        
        var jobDetail = JobBuilder.Create<HelloJob>()
            .WithIdentity("myJob")
            .StoreDurably()
            .Build();

        var trigger = TriggerBuilder.Create()
            .WithIdentity("myTrigger")
            .StartNow()
            .WithSimpleSchedule(x => x.WithIntervalInMinutes(1).RepeatForever())
            .Build();

        scheduler.ScheduleJob(jobDetail, trigger);
    }
}

In this case you can pass the same provider instance to the UseCrystalQuartz call:

public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
{
    /* ... */
    app.UseCrystalQuartz(new MySchedulerProvider());
}

If you are going to connect to a remote scheduler the RemoteSchedulerProvider implementation of ISchedulerProvider would be more concise than the explicit configuration:

public class Startup
{
    public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
    {
        app.UseCrystalQuartz(new RemoteSchedulerProvider
        {
            SchedulerHost = "tcp://localhost:555/QuartzScheduler"
        });
    }
}

2.2 Options

Second (optional) argument of UseCrystalQuartz method allows to do some panel customizations. The object should be an instance of CrystalQuartzOptions class. Please check the options class source code for details.

3 Running the panel

Once the configuration is done, you can run your project and navigate to http://YOUR_URL/quartz to see the panel UI.

4 Examples

Please check these samples demonstrating different cases of using CrystalQuartz with OWIN environment: