Asynchronous Behaviour in Applications using Message Queues

October 04, 2016

This was one of the features that interested me most in message queues. Basically, you have an application, and you want to communicate to it; that is, Joe Bloggs the user is sat there, tapping away at his keyboard, and I want to send him a message that interrupts him. There are dozens of use cases for this: the user has entered an order and there’s a problem with it, the user’s account has been locked and needs to be logged out, we want to alert them that there’s a data change so that they can refresh their data.

The relevant part of message queuing here is a topic; which allows me to send an alert to one of more listeners.

To this end, I’ve extended my helper class to include a TopicHelper:



public class TopicHelper : IDisposable
{
    IReceiveTopicBehaviour \_receiveBehaviour = null;
    ConnectionFactory \_factory = new ConnectionFactory() { HostName = "localhost" };
    IConnection \_connection = null;
    IModel \_channel = null;
    EventingBasicConsumer \_consumer = null;
 
    private void SetupChannel()
    {
        if (\_connection == null)
        {
            \_connection = \_factory.CreateConnection();
            \_channel = \_connection.CreateModel();
        }
    }
 
    private void SetupConsumer()
    {
        if (\_channel == null) throw new Exception("Channel is not set-up");
        if (\_connection == null) throw new Exception("Connection is not set-up");
 
        if (\_consumer == null)
            \_consumer = new EventingBasicConsumer(\_channel);
    }
 
    public void ReceiveTopic(string topicName, string key, IReceiveTopicBehaviour behaviour)
    {
        \_receiveBehaviour = behaviour;
 
        SetupChannel();
        SetupConsumer();
 
        \_channel.ExchangeDeclare(topicName, "topic");
        var queue = \_channel.QueueDeclare();
        var queueName = queue.QueueName;
 
        \_channel.QueueBind(queue: queueName,
        exchange: topicName,
        routingKey: key);
 
        \_consumer.Received += Consumer\_Received;
 
        \_channel.BasicConsume(queueName, true, \_consumer);
 
    }
 
    private void Consumer\_Received(object sender, BasicDeliverEventArgs e)
    {
        var body = e.Body;
        var message = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(body);
        Console.WriteLine(message);
 
        \_receiveBehaviour.OnReceive(message);
    }
 
    public void SendTopic(string topicName, string key, string data)
    {
        SetupChannel();
 
        \_channel.ExchangeDeclare(topicName, "topic");
        \_channel.BasicPublish(topicName, key, null, Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data));            
 
    }
 
    public void Dispose()
    {            
        \_connection.Dispose();
        \_channel.Dispose();            
    }
}

There’s a lot of code here, but basically there’s only two methods of note: SendTopic() and ReceiveTopic(). I’ve also made it a disposable class. The next thing we want is a listener; for this, I’ve used a WPF app, but any application should be able to do this:

rabbitalert1

The call to set-up the alert is this:



public partial class MainWindow : Window
{
    private TopicHelper \_topicHelper = new TopicHelper();
    public MainWindow()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
 
        Task.Run(() =>
        {
            ReceiveTopic recTopic = new ReceiveTopic();
            \_topicHelper.ReceiveTopic("Alerts", "thisApp", recTopic);
        });
    }
}

I’ve used the code behind because I’m just proving a point. Obviously, in real life, this would be some abstraction in the business layer. The main thing to note is the ReceiveTopic class that is instantiated and passed through; here’s its implementation:




public class ReceiveTopic : IReceiveTopicBehaviour
{
    public void OnReceive(string message)
    {
        System.Windows.MessageBox.Show(message);
    }
}

This, effectively, allows me to provide custom functionality on the receive. If you find that you’re using this to pass in the same one-liner, you could adapt this to simply pass in an action.

The final piece of the puzzle is the send alert; in my case this is a console app:

rabbitalert2

Here’s the code for the main function:




static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Alert: ");
    string alertText = Console.ReadLine();
 
    using (TopicHelper helper = new TopicHelper())
    {
        helper.SendTopic("Alerts", "thisApp", alertText);
    }
 
    Console.WriteLine("Finished");
    Console.ReadLine();
}

Does it work?

Yes, of course.

rabbitalert3



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