Scheduled subscriptions don't work (but Event-driven ones do) for NS Newsletter sample

Hello,

I am using the Newsletter sample bundled with Notification Services (using SQL 2005 SP1)

When I create Scheduled subscriptions using the 'SubscriptionManagementWeb' app that ships with the sample, then copy an Events.xml file to the watch folder, I never get an alert (i.e. I set the time to now + 5 minutes, wait, never receive).

When I create an Event-driven subscription, on the other hand, and copy an Events.xml file to the watch folder, I do successfully get a notification.

I also created my own separate NS application, and it has the same problem as the sample. Event-driven subscriptions work, but Scheduled ones do not.

Any ideas?

TIA,

Alex

Hi I don't know if you have checked this in the books online but it has somethig to do with schedulled subscriptions:

Time Zone-Specific Scheduled Subscriptions

Notification Services supports scheduled subscriptions. Because a notification application can support subscribers in any time zone, it is important that Notification Services store information about the time zone for timely notification delivery.

To make multiple time zone support easier, Notification Services stores date and time information using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) notation.

When a subscriber creates a scheduled subscription, the subscriber enters the time zone (or the time zone is obtained from other sources, such as a database or operating system setting) and the desired delivery time. When Notification Services stores the delivery time, it uses the time zone to compute the UTC time for delivery and then stores the UTC time. When the UTC time arrives, Notification Services generates notifications from any current events and then formats and distributes the notifications.

|||

Interesting. Well I am UTC - 8 hrs (same as GMT - 8 hrs except for rare circumstances). I launched the "SubscriptionManagementWeb" web application that comes with the Newsletter sample in debug mode, and saw that it was saving a subscription with:

Schedule start: "TZID=4:20070131T025500"

Schedule recurrence: "FREQ=WEEKLY;BYDAY=WE"

Even if the time zone were off, it should be triggered on a weekly basis. I've submitted test newsletters that match the scheduled subscription over a span of two weeks, never received a notification.

To test the UTC theory out, I set the schedule start to Now + 9 hours (since UTC is 8 hours ahead of my time zone). This way, I should expect to get the event in Now + 1 hour.

Result: didn't get the event, when I copied the event.xml file to the drop location. So I don't think it's time zone based.

Any other suggestions? Don't see any errors in the event log; don't see anything useful from running the Diagnostics sp's that it generated.

|||Hi Alex -

When working with scheduled subscriptions, I usually find that the problems can generally be found in one of four areas.

1) A scheduled subscription either does not exist or is incorrectly configured. You'd be surprised at how often this is the problem.

2) The scheduled subscription doesn't actually match an event that is coming in.

3) There is a problem in the matching rule so no rows are ever produced.

4) Notifications are created in the notifications table, but cannot be delivered due to a problem in the delivery protocol (incorrect permissions, etc).

You may want to look into the underlying tables and views to see if you can gain some more insight into why you're not seeing the final notification. Also change the logging level to verbose and check the Application event log.

HTH...

Joe