I have been reading loads about timers, and options for achieving my goal, and I believe I need to use system.timers.timer and set the interval correctly.
I think I know how to do this but what I am unsure of is where to do it, do I do so in my view, my controller, global.asax?
Maybe I shouldn't use a timer at all?
What I'm looking for is the best way to run an if statement on the hour, every hour, and update the view depending on the results of that if
Usually a web app (MVC or WebForms) isn't the best place to run scheduled tasks. It can be done, but you will get things like IIS recycling application pools and other anomalies, which although useful to a web app, could get in the way of reliably scheduling tasks.
A lot of developers (and my favourite too) schedule their tasks in a Windows Service. This can be installed and can be set to gracefully start and stop when the server starts and shuts down. You can then set up logging and other health monitoring to monitor the state of your scheduler service.
However if your tasks is purely SQL based you may wish to use SQL Server's inbuilt scheduling (or similar for any other database). Another alternative is to use the operating system's scheduler.
Edit
In regard to updating your view with the results, you can store and update the status of your scheduled tasks in the database with columns like 'TaskStatus' (New, Waiting, Running, Aborted, Failed, Cancelled, Completed) and 'TaskResult' (probably empty for success or the error message from a failure). You can then show and filter this information on your results view by retrieving it from the database.
JavaScript - On Your Page:
You can redirect to the controller > action that is your required function through JavaScript:
<script type="text/JavaScript">
setTimeout("location.href = '/YourDefineUrlPathHere';",1500);
</script>
HTML Meta tag - On Your Page:
Other is you can do it through meta tag if you want to call your view action again (in other words refresh it)
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="15;url='/YourDefineUrlPathHere'">
<!—‘15’ is number of seconds you want to wait-- >
</head>
Timers – in your controller
aTimer = new System.Timers.Timer(10000);
aTimer.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(YourMethodHere);
aTimer.Interval = 2000;
aTimer.Enabled = true;
See MSDN: Timer
However another way and I guess more ‘standard’ way to achieve your result could be through Window Services if you want to pursue it in this direction this link might help you a lot. Introduction to Windows Service Applications
What do you mean by "update the view"?
An MVC View is a class - you can only "update" objects as they have values. Views are instantiated when a user requests the page.
If you mean you want the user to have a page open in their browser all the time and it gets refreshed every hour, then you could use a timer in javascript on the client to reload the page every hour.
If you mean you want to update the results of any user opening your page depending on data that changes every hour, you can store the last update time in your database and then when the view runs check if the data is more than an hour old. If it is, run your if statement in your controller.
Use Azure Functions. You can run scheduled tasks using a timer trigger. It's pretty good.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-overview
