ActiveMQ: Intercept publishing to a certain topic - java

I'm setting up an ActiveMQ broker with MQTT that uses an external service for user authentication.
I figured out how to write a BrokerFilter and plug it into a broker, so the basics are covered.
I could even limit users in the topics they are allowed to subscribe on using the addConsumer() override. That method looks like this, and works:
override fun addConsumer(context: ConnectionContext?, info: ConsumerInfo?): Subscription {
// let connections from the local vm through
return if (isLocalConnection(context!!)) {
super.addConsumer(context, info)
} else {
val username = context?.userName ?: ""
val cameraCode = getTopicElementsFromDestination(info!!.destination).first()
assertUserHasPermissionForCamera(username, cameraCode)
super.addConsumer(context, info)
}
}
So I thought that restricting publishing would work pretty much the same with an override of addProducer(), but I stumbled over a few problems.
The first problem was that subscriptions also called addProducer(), which was surprising to say the least. But the real surprise was that ConsumerInfo::destination is always null when this method is called. I've searched far and wide, but I'm unable to find a way to extract the topic being published to from the information passed to addProducer(). Without knowing which topic the producer wants to publish to, I obviously can't limit it.
So I tried overriding messageDelivered() instead, figuring I could just discard the message when it is published to the wrong topic, achieving more or less the same effect. According to the documentation, this method should be called whenever the broker receives a message. But it doesn't get called when I send a message to the broker, so either I'm misunderstanding what "a message delivered to the broker" means or something is fishy.
I also tried addSession(), which also doesn't get called.
So... How can I intercept when a client publishes to a certain topic?

After some hunting through the source code and a lot of overriding methods and seeing when they get called and what they receive, I learned two things that helped me do what I wanted:
The topic being published to is encapsulated in the message. A Producer doesn't register to publish to a certain topic, it just registers to publish to any topic. The broker itself doesn't know to what topic, that's handled on a message-by-message basis. So my first attempts to limit topics in addProducer() were futile, because nobody knows the topic yet.
The earliest point in the publish chain where both username and topic are available is addDestination(). The topic can first be known in send(), but you don't have the user. It might be possible to do the authorisation there by persisting the username for the context, but I don't like state. So I put the authorisation into addDestination(), and it works.
There's a potential caveat here, though. According to the documentation, addDestination() only gets called if a destination doesn't exist yet. All tests I could do in the limited time confirmed that this is always the case on a publish, even if somebody is subscribed to the topic. But it might be different if the producer maintains a persistent connection, So use this solution with care.

Related

Manage delivery of JMS messages to multiple servers

Our app uses Spring Boot and JMS messages with Tibco. We have two production servers running and processing messages concurrently. Servers are listening to the same one queue. Each server has 10 concurrent listeners. I do not want the very same message gets processed by both servers at the same time. Nothing prevents our queue of having duplicate messages, like we can have two copies of the message A in the queue. If messages in the queue are: A, A, B, C, D, then if first A gets delivered to server1 and second A gets delivered to server2, and both servers process A at the same time, then they are chances of creating duplicate entities. I want to find a way to send all A messages to only one server. I can't use Message Selector b/c we have the same code base running on both servers. This is what I'm considering:
Based on the message, set properties in the headers. Once the message got delivered to the process() method, depending on which server is processing the message, either discard, simply return the message or process the message and acknowledge it. The problem with this solution is that since we need to dynamicacaly find out which server is processing the message, the server name needs to be hardcoded, meaning if the server moves, the code breaks!
Other solution - that might work - is the Destination field.
https://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/4.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/jms.html
Destinations, like ConnectionFactories, are JMS administered objects
that can be stored and retrieved in JNDI. When configuring a Spring
application context you can use the JNDI factory class
JndiObjectFactoryBean / to perform dependency
injection on your object’s references to JMS destinations.
It's something I never done before. Is there anyway, to configure the Destination that it picks up the right server to route the message to? Meaning, if message1 is supposed to be delivered to server1, then it does not even gets delivered to server2 and remains in the queue until server1 consumes it?
What are other ways to implement this?
EDIT:
I still do not know what’s the best way to send certain messages to only one server for processing, however, accepted the response given to use database as validation, b/c this is what we consider to avoid creating duplicate entities when processing the data.
I think the idea of using the JMS Destination is a non-starter as there is nothing in the JMS specification which guarantees any kind of link between the destination and a broker. The destination is just an encapsulation for the provider-specific queue/topic name.
The bottom line here is that you either need to prevent the duplicate messages in the first place or have some way to coordinate the consumers to deal with the duplicates after they've been pulled off the queue. I think you could do either of these using an external system like a database, e.g.:
When producing the message check the database for an indication that the message was sent already. If no indication is found then write a record to the database (will need to use a primary key to prevent duplicates) and send the message. Otherwise don't send the message.
When consuming the message check the database for an indication that the message is being (or was) consumed already. If no indication is found then write a record to the database (will need to use a primary key to prevent duplicates) and process the message. Otherwise just acknowledge the message without processing it.
I suggest an alternative to "post DB sync".
Keep the servers and listeners as-is, and broadcast all+ the the processed messages on a topic. For servers just starting, you can use "durable subscribers" to not miss any messages.
If you broadcast each start and end of processing for messages A, B, C, etc AND consider adding a little pause (in milli), you should avoid collisions. It's the main risk of course.
It's not clear to me if you should validate for duplicate processing at the beginning or end of a message processing... it depends on your needs.
If this whole idea is not acceptable, DB validation might be the only option, but as stated in comments above, I fear for scaling.

Does RabbitTemplate.send() guarantee the delivery of messages to RabbitMQ?

Using Spring AMQP, when the call to the method rabbitTemplate.send(message) returns (from org.springframework.amqp.rabbit.core.RabbitTemplate class), can we be sure that the message has been delivered and replicated on the RabbitMQ cluster?
UPDATE: This is not correct answer. Please see the answer of #GaryRussell
If you mean the only communication between publisher and RabbitMQ
then yes. You don't have to do anything other than that to ensure message storing and replication is part of RabbitMQ work.
Please remember to catch the AmqpException if there is any problem happen to send message!
No it does not. AMQP is an asynchronous protocol. To guarantee delivery you need to use Publisher Confirms and Returns - and even then, the confirmation (or return) comes back on another thread.

Best Practice for resilience of messages across RabbitMQ queues

I am trying to understand the best use of RabbitMQ to satisfy the following problem.
As context I'm not concerned with performance in this use case (my peak TPS for this flow is 2 TPS) but I am concerned about resilience.
I have RabbitMQ installed in a cluster and ignoring dead letter queues the basic flow is I have a service receive a request, creates a persistent message which it queues, in a transaction, to a durable queue (at this point I'm happy the request is secured to disk). I then have another process listening for a message, which it reads (not using auto ack), does a bunch of stuff, writes a new message to a different exchange queue in a transaction (again now happy this message is secured to disk). Assuming the transaction completes successfully it manually acks the message back to the original consumer.
At this point my only failure scenario is is I have a failure between the commit of the transaction to write to my second queue and the return of the ack. This will lead to a message being potentially processed twice. Is there anything else I can do to plug this gap or do I have to figure out a way of handling duplicate messages.
As a final bit of context the services are written in java so using the java client libs.
Paul Fitz.
First of all, I suggest you to look a this guide here which has a lot of valid information on your topic.
From the RabbitMQ guide:
At the Producer
When using confirms, producers recovering from a channel or connection
failure should retransmit any messages for which an acknowledgement
has not been received from the broker. There is a possibility of
message duplication here, because the broker might have sent a
confirmation that never reached the producer (due to network failures,
etc). Therefore consumer applications will need to perform
deduplication or handle incoming messages in an idempotent manner.
At the Consumer
In the event of network failure (or a node crashing), messages can be
duplicated, and consumers must be prepared to handle them. If
possible, the simplest way to handle this is to ensure that your
consumers handle messages in an idempotent way rather than explicitly
deal with deduplication.
So, the point is that is not possibile in any way at all to guarantee that this "failure" scenario of yours will not happen. You will always have to deal with network failure, disk failure, put something here failure etc.
What you have to do here is to lean on the messaging architecture and implement if possibile "idempotency" of your messages (which means that even if you process the message twice is not going to happen anything wrong, check this).
If you can't than you should provide some kind of "processed message" list (for example you can use a guid inside every message) and check this list every time you receive a message; you can simply discard them in this case.
To be more "theorical", this post from Brave New Geek is very interesting:
Within the context of a distributed system, you cannot have
exactly-once message delivery.
Hope it helps :)

Spring AMQP return callback vs retry callback

I want to make my app resilient to connection issues that can happen when sending messages to rabbitmq. I want to get hold of all unsent messages, store them and send them latter, when rabbitmq becomes available.
Looking at the official documentation I didn't manage to figure out what is the difference between return callback and retry callback. I understand that retry callback is invoked when retry template exhausts configured policy but don't find this much useful since context doesn't contain message itself.
Based on "replyCode" that is passed in the "returnedMessage" method of ReturnCallback interface one can easily determine further behavior but haven't figured out when this callback is invoked.
One way to go is ConfirmCallback but there is an issue of having additional logic for keeping in sync CorrelationData and messages and statuses of those messages.
So...except ConfirmCallback interface is there any easier way to keep track of messages that are not successfully sent through RabbitMQ using Spring AMQP?
Returns are when the broker returns a message because it's undeliverable (no matching bindings on the exchange to which the message was published, and the mandatory bit is set).
Confirms are when the broker sends an ack back to the publisher, indicating that a message was successfully routed.
Retry is outside the broker realm so it is likely what you need for your use case.

Implementing a JMS Request-Reply. Queue vs Topic?

I understand that there are different ways (or permutations) to implementing a JMS Request-Reply mechanism, i.e. request queue and response queue, request topic and response topic, or a mix of either.
What I would like to know is, (1) what is the recommended (or most common) way and (2) how do the different permutations measure up?
Next, is it more correct to say
a. "Send a message to a queue" or b. "Send a message through a queue"?
Cheers!
Normally, use a queue. "Request" implies a recipient, not a notice to anyone who cares, so you probably want the behaviour of a queue.
Queues usually do better for one thing - or a limited number of peer things - receiving the message and processing it. They also tend to saner persistence models than topic, when it matters that the message actually get to someone who processes it. (eg: if dropping the message is a problem, you probably want a queue)
Topics are more broadcast oriented: say something, and anyone who cares will hear about it. Normally that goes hand-in-hand with "...and no direct response is expected" because the "zero or more listeners" model ... well, zero listeners is always a problem if you expect a response.
Topics can do persistence, but the rules are stranger, and seldom what you actually want.
Finally, I think most people say "to" a queue, because the queue and the thing(s) processing messages off it are distinct, but really, it doesn't matter much as log as you convey your meaning.
Also with a Queue you are able to have multiple subscribers process the messages so its kid of a built in loadbalancer. You cannot do this easily with a Topic.

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