Suspending and modifying NServiceBus saga timeouts

Question

I have a saga which represents a long-running work assignment process of a "Person" to a "Case". Several events may kick it off, and at the end of the process we have an assignment confirmation, at which point the saga completes and the Person is assigned to the Case. I would like to have a timeout for this saga so that we don't wait indefinitely for confirmation - definitely a valid business use case. No difficulties there - fairly vanilla.

The twist is that this assignment process can be blocked if someone puts the Case on hold. I have an event I can subscribe to so my assignment saga knows the Case is on hold, but unless I adjust the timeout or suspend it in some way, the assignment saga will likely time out before the Case hold is released. It doesn't make business sense to do this, so I basically want to stop the timeout clock until some other event comes in.

This same issue was mentioned here a couple years ago. Is this still not possible or are there new features in v3.x that would allow it? If not, is it a planned feature?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't think there is a way to tab directly to the timer and put the timeout message "on-hold"

I would have that logic inside the timeout handler on the saga. Check if the case is on hold and request another timeout without ending the saga.

Answer 2

Why not remove the timeout altogether for the instance when your case is put on hold? Your saga maintains the state of the case and the calculated time when the case would have been due. This could have been set when you created the first timeout. When the case is reactivated, simply calculate the difference in time from the reactivation and the saved "deadline", and create a new timeout for that instance with the difference. You may also want to take into account the time the case was on hold and set a new deadline which you would save back to the instance state.