Publishing the Rebus mesage from exception catch block without hampering retry mechanism

I am trying to publish a message from the catch block in the Rebus message handlers without affecting the retry mechanism of rebus.

My intent is,

Process the message in message handlers.
In case of an error, catch it, and publish some error event using the same bus.
Just after publishing "throw" the caught exception so that rebus ACK/NACK is placed automatically for the retry/re-delivery of the message.

I cannot achieve the above because if an exception is thrown from the rebus message handlers, that message is automatically flagged for re-delivery and the whole pipeline transaction is rolled back. This negates the second point above as when transaction is rolled back, the message I sent to be published is rolled back as well. Is there a way I could achieve this i.e. publishing the message as well as auto-retry ability. My message handler code is below.

public Task Handle(SomeMessage message)
    {
        try
        {
            //Some code that may result in an error
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            _bus.PublishSomeMessageErrorEvent(ex);

            // throw an error and let Rebus retry the delivery.
            throw;
        }
        return Task.CompletedTask;
    }

I Also tried working with second level retries so that when failed message comes in the IHandleMessages<IFailed> handler I would simply publish the message with _bus.PublishSomeMessageErrorEvent(...) method but while setting the second level retry I received exception while starting the bus.

_bus = Configure.With(...)
      .Options(r=>r.SimpleRetryStrategy(secondLevelRetriesEnabled:true))
      .ConfigureSqlServerTransportFromAppConfig()
      .Logging(c => c.Log4Net())
      .Start();

The exception Attempted to register primary -> Rebus.Retry.Simple.SimpleRetryStrategySettings, but a primary registration already exists: primary -> Rebus.Retry.Simple.SimpleRetryStrategySettings

Solution

You can use Rebus' built-in "transaction scope suppressor" by creating a scope with it like this:

using (new RebusTransactionScopeSuppressor())
{
    // bus operations in here will not be enlisted
    // in the transaction scope of the message
    // context (i.e. the one associated with the
    // handler)
}

so your message handler can simply go

public class SomeMessageHandler : IHandleMessages<SomeMessage>
{
    readonly IBus _bus;

    public SomeMessageHandler(IBus bus) => _bus = bus ?? throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(bus));

    public async Task Handle(SomeMessage message)
    {
        try
        {
            await DoSomethingThatCanThrow();
        }
        catch (Exception exception)
        {
            // publish event
            using (new RebusTransactionScopeSuppressor())
            {
                var evt = new CaughtThisException(exception.ToString());

                await _bus.Publish(evt);
            }

            // rethrow to have Rebus exception handling kick in
            throw;
        }
    }

    async Task DoSomethingThatCanThrow()
    {
        // (...)
    }
}

and achieve what you want.

PS: Remember to await async things 🙂 it's not clear whether the PublishSomeMessageErrorEvent is sync or async, but somehow your code looks a bit like it could actually be async.