How to update Expiration Time in Azure Notification Hub registration?

Question

I've been working with Azure Notification Hubs for awhile. However, I created a new Notification Hub for a new project and I've noticed some very odd behavior. Whenever I create a registration its ExpirationDate is set to 12/31/9999 7:59:59 .

So, for some, I suppose this may be a benefit, but I'd like to expire mine after a certain period of inactivity. I looked through the RegistrationDescription object and found an ExpirationTime but it's read only...

How do I set this? Is this just a bug in Azure? Maybe a flag I'm missing from Azure configuration?

Answer 1

You can do that, but on hub level, not on registration level. Check out Improved Per Message Telemetry and device expiry for Notification Hubs blog post:

To take advantage of this expiry change, simply update your notification hub's Time To Live property. This can be done through REST or our .NET SDK:

var namespaceManager = NamespaceManager.CreateFromConnectionString("connectionstring");
NotificationHubDescription hub = namespaceManager.GetNotificationHub("foo");
hub.RegistrationTtl = TimeSpan.MaxValue;
namespaceManager.UpdateNotificationHub(hub);

To do that via the REST API, check out Update Notification Hub method, which takes NotificationHubDescription body, which has a RegistrationTtl node in it. That should be a REST equivalent of the SDK code snippet above.

Answer 2

The documentation is outdated, I had to open a ticket with Microsoft to be able to do this in 2020.

I created a console app and added the following nuget packages -

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Azure.Management.NotificationHubs https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Azure.Management.ResourceManager.Fluent/

Install-Package Microsoft.Azure.Management.NotificationHubs -Version 2.3.2-preview

Install-Package Microsoft.Azure.Management.ResourceManager.Fluent -Version 1.34.0

Then I wrote this method -

    private async Task SetNotificationHubRegistrationTimeToLive()
    {
        // Login to Azure using az login
        // az account set -s <name or ID of subscription> to set the proper subscription
        // Get credentials: "az ad sp create-for-rbac --sdk-auth"
        // See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/get-started-with-azure-cli?view=azure-cli-latest and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-shell/quickstart

        var clientId = "ec1b...";
        var clientSecret = "oJJ6...";
        var tenantId = "2b86...";

        var credentials =
                SdkContext
                .AzureCredentialsFactory
                .FromServicePrincipal(
                    clientId,
                    clientSecret,
                    tenantId,
                    AzureEnvironment.AzureGlobalCloud);

        var client = new NotificationHubsManagementClient(credentials)
        {
            SubscriptionId = "yoursubscriptionid"
        };

        var resourceGroupName = "yourgroup";
        var namespaceName = "yournamespace"; // this should NOT be the namespace full name beam-dev-notification-hub-namespace-free.servicebus.windows.net
        var notificationHubName = "yournotificationhub";

        var timeSpan = new TimeSpan(days: 90, hours: 0, minutes: 0, seconds: 0);
        var registrationTtlTimeSpanString = timeSpan.ToString();

        var notificationHub = await client.NotificationHubs.GetAsync(resourceGroupName, namespaceName, notificationHubName);

        await client
              .NotificationHubs
              .CreateOrUpdateAsync(
                resourceGroupName,
                namespaceName,
                notificationHubName,
                new NotificationHubCreateOrUpdateParameters(notificationHub.Location)
                {
                    RegistrationTtl = registrationTtlTimeSpanString
                });
    }

You will then see in https://portal.azure.com/ in your notification hub properties -