Extensions – JobQueue

Introduction

The extension class telegram.ext.JobQueue allows you to perform tasks with a delay or even periodically, at a set interval. Among many other things, you can use it to send regular updates to your subscribers.

Usage

The JobQueue class is tightly integrated with other telegram.ext classes. Similar to Updater and Dispatcher, it runs asynchronously in a separate thread.

To use the JobQueue, you don't have to do much. When you instantiate the Updater, it will create a JobQueue for you:

import telegram.ext
from telegram.ext import Updater

u = Updater('TOKEN', use_context=True)
j = u.job_queue

This job queue is also linked to the dispatcher, which is discussed later in this article. Just know that unless you have a good reason to do so, you should not instantiate JobQueue yourself.

Tasks in the job queue are encapsulated by the Job class. It takes a callback function as a parameter, which will be executed when the time comes. This callback function always takes one parameter: context, a telegram.ext.CallbackContext. Like in the case of handler callbacks used by the Dispatcher, through this object you can access context.bot, the Updater's telegram.Bot instance; and for this particular case you can also access context.job, which is the Job instance of the task that triggered the callback (more on that later).

You can use the following 3 methods to create jobs with different frequency and time: job_queue.run_once, job_queue.run_repeating, job_queue.run_daily and job_queue.run_monthly. (As before, you do not usually need to instantiate the Job class directly.)

Tutorial

Add your first job to the queue by defining a callback function and adding it to the job queue. For this tutorial, you can replace '@examplechannel' with a channel where your bot is an admin, or by your user id (use @userinfobot to find out your user id):

def callback_minute(context: telegram.ext.CallbackContext):
    context.bot.send_message(chat_id='@examplechannel', 
                             text='One message every minute')

job_minute = j.run_repeating(callback_minute, interval=60, first=0)

(Ignore the type annotations if you're on Python 2)

The callback_minute function will be executed every 60.0 seconds, the first time being right now (because of first=0). The interval and first parameters are in seconds if they are int or float. They can also be datetime objects. See the docs for detailed explanation. The return value of these functions are the Job objects being created. You don't need to store the result of run_repeating (which is the newly instantiated Job) if you don't need it; we will make use of it later in this tutorial.

You can also add a job that will be executed only once, with a delay:

def callback_30(context: telegram.ext.CallbackContext):
    context.bot.send_message(chat_id='@examplechannel', 
                             text='A single message with 30s delay')

j.run_once(callback_30, 30)

In thirty seconds you should receive the message from callback_30.

If you are tired of receiving a message every minute, you can temporarily disable a job or even completely remove it from the queue:

job_minute.enabled = False  # Temporarily disable this job
job_minute.schedule_removal()  # Remove this job completely

Note: schedule_removal does not immediately remove the job from the queue. Instead, it is marked for removal and will be removed as soon as its current interval is over (it will not run again after being marked for removal).

A job can also change its own behavior, as it is passed to the callback function as the second argument:

def callback_increasing(context: telegram.ext.CallbackContext):
    job = context.job
    context.bot.send_message(chat_id='@examplechannel',
                             text='Sending messages with increasing delay up to 10s, then stops.')
    job.interval += 1.0
    if job.interval > 10.0:
        job.schedule_removal()

j.run_repeating(callback_increasing, 1)

This job will send a first message after one second, a second message after two more seconds, a third message after three more seconds, and so on. After the ten messages, the job will terminate itself.

You might want to add jobs in response to certain user input, and there is a convenient way to do that. All Handler classes can pass the job queue into their callback functions, if you need them to. To do that, simply set pass_job_queue=True when instantiating the Handler. Another feature you can use here is the context keyword argument of Job. You can pass any object as a context parameter when you launch a Job and retrieve it at a later stage as long as the Job exists. Let's see how it looks in code:

from telegram.ext import CommandHandler
def callback_alarm(context: telegram.ext.CallbackContext):
    context.bot.send_message(chat_id=context.job.context, text='BEEP')

def callback_timer(update: telegram.Update, context: telegram.ext.CallbackContext):
    context.bot.send_message(chat_id=update.message.chat_id,
                             text='Setting a timer for 1 minute!')

    context.job_queue.run_once(callback_alarm, 60, context=update.message.chat_id)

timer_handler = CommandHandler('timer', callback_timer)
u.dispatcher.add_handler(timer_handler)

By placing the chat_id in the Job object, the callback function knows where it should send the message.

All good things must come to an end, so when you stop the Updater, the related job queue will be stopped as well:

u.stop()

Of course, you can instead also stop the job queue by itself:

j.stop()