Can I have more than one outbox in the same application, to have different retry policies?

[lburja]

I would like to have more than one transactional outbox in my application, so that I can configure each one with different attempt frequency and number of attempts.

For example, some operations need to be retried for long a period of time (e.g., attempt for up to 7 days). And for others, a shorter retry policy is desirable (e.g., give up after a few minutes or after a few retries).

I was wondering if the outboxes would interfere with each other in unexpected ways (since they work on the same TXNO_OUTBOX table).

Or if there is there a recommended way to achieve what I want, i.e. to have different retry policies for different operations?

[badgerwithagun]

Interesting idea. There is no easy way to do this.

I think what we probably want is a new option for parameterised calls, e.g.

  outbox.with().retryBehaviour(attempts, timeBetweenAttempts).schedule(MyService.class).doSomething()`

And add overrideMaxAttemptCount and overrideTimeBetweenAttempts nullable fields to TXNO_OUTBOX. to support it.

It's not a tricky change.

[lburja]

I made a pull request following this suggestion

[badgerwithagun]

For now, I don't think there will be any problems running two instances of TransactionOutbox in the same app with different configurations. but I don't think it will achieve what you want, because both instances will compete to process the retries for each others' jobs. The effect you will get is that all jobs randomly use a mixture of the two behaviours depending on which instance does the work.

[lburja]

If the two instances are competing for retries, it won’t be helpful in my case. I had a feeling this could happen, so thanks for confirming it.

I like the other proposal, but I understand it requires development. I’ll take a look at the code, but if it involves adding new columns, then I suspect it won’t be as straightforward as it sounds.