Passing Arguments¶
You can pass additional data to your background jobs as a regular method arguments. I’ll write the following line once again (hope it hasn’t bothered you):
BackgroundJob.Enqueue(() => Console.WriteLine("Hello, {0}!", "world"));
As in a regular method call, these arguments will be available for the Console.WriteLine method during the performance of the background job. But since they are marshaled through process boundaries, they are serialized.
The awesome Newtonsoft.Json package is used to serialize arguments into JSON strings (since version 1.1.0). So you can use almost any type as a parameter; including arrays, collections and custom objects. Please see corresponding documentation for more details.
Reference parameters are not supported
You can not pass arguments to parameters by reference – ref and out keywords are not supported.
Since arguments are serialized, consider their values carefully as they can blow up your job storage. Most of the time it is more efficient to store concrete values in an application database and pass their identifiers only to your background jobs.
Remember that background jobs may be processed days or weeks after they were enqueued. If you use data that is subject to change in your arguments, it may become stale – database records may be deleted, the text of an article may be changed, etc. Plan for these changes and design your background jobs accordingly.