Manually trigger Azure Function - Time triggered

Question

I have an Azure Function that runs on a timer trigger once a week. This works great and as expected, but about once or twice a month, a user needs this function to run upon request, so I need to do a post to the function to trigger it - much like you can do from the Azure portal.

Looking at the Azure portal, a http post request is being done to the function like:

https://{funcapp}.azurewebsites.net/admin/functions/{func}

However, if I do this from Postman, I get a Http 401 response. How would I go about to do this request?

One option I have a to rather change the trigger to a queue and have a second function run on the weekly basis that would add a message to the queue, but this seems a bit excessive to me.

Marie Hoeger Marie Hoeger · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-07T22:36:44

What if you share business logic between functions by using the fact that a single function app can be composed of multiple functions? Then you can have one function.json trigger based off of an HTTP request and the other trigger based off of a timer.

Your function app architecture could look like:

MyFunctionApp
|     host.json
|____ shared
|     |____ businessLogic.js
|____ function1
|     |____ index.js
|     |____ function.json
|____ function2
      |____ index.js
      |____ function.json

In "function1/index.js" and "function2/index.js"

var logic = require("../shared/businessLogic");

module.exports = logic;

The function.json of function1 and function2 can be configured to different triggers (timer and HTTP or queue... whatever you want!).

In "shared/businessLogic.js

module.exports = function (context, req) {
    // This is where shared code goes. As an example, for an HTTP trigger:
    context.res = {
        body: "<b>Hello World</b>",
        status: 201,
        headers: {
            'content-type': "text/html"
        }
    };     
    context.done();
};

(This is a JavaScript example, but same holds for other languages!)

Manually trigger Azure Function - Time triggered

2 Answers