This guide describes how to use Service Bus topics and subscriptions from Node.js applications. The scenarios covered include creating topics and subscriptions, creating subscription filters, sending messages to a topic, receiving messages from a subscription, and deleting topics and subscriptions. For more information on topics and subscriptions, see the Next Steps section.
[AZURE.INCLUDE howto-service-bus-topics]
Create a blank Node.js application. For instructions on creating a Node.js application, see Create and deploy a Node.js application to an Azure Web Site, Node.js Cloud Service (using Windows PowerShell), or Web Site with WebMatrix.
To use Service Bus, download the Node.js azure package. This package includes a set of libraries that communicate with the Service Bus REST services.
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Use a command-line interface such as PowerShell (Windows,) Terminal (Mac,) or Bash (Unix), navigate to the folder where you created your sample application.
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Type npm install azure in the command window, which should result in the following output:
azure@0.7.5 node_modules\azure ├── dateformat@1.0.2-1.2.3 ├── xmlbuilder@0.4.2 ├── node-uuid@1.2.0 ├── mime@1.2.9 ├── underscore@1.4.4 ├── validator@1.1.1 ├── tunnel@0.0.2 ├── wns@0.5.3 ├── xml2js@0.2.7 (sax@0.5.2) └── request@2.21.0 (json-stringify-safe@4.0.0, forever-agent@0.5.0, aws-sign@0.3.0, tunnel-agent@0.3.0, oauth-sign@0.3.0, qs@0.6.5, cookie-jar@0.3.0, node-uuid@1.4.0, http-signature@0.9.11, form-data@0.0.8, hawk@0.13.1) -
You can manually run the ls command to verify that a node_modules folder was created. Inside that folder find the azure package, which contains the libraries you need to access Service Bus topics.
Using Notepad or another text editor, add the following to the top of the server.js file of the application:
var azure = require('azure');
The azure module will read the environment variables AZURE_SERVICEBUS_NAMESPACE and AZURE_SERVICEBUS_ACCESS_KEY for information required to connect to your Azure Service Bus. If these environment variables are not set, you must specify the account information when calling createServiceBusService.
For an example of setting the environment variables in a configuration file for an Azure Cloud Service, see Node.js Cloud Service with Storage.
For an example of setting the environment variables in the management portal for an Azure Website, see Node.js Web Application with Storage
The ServiceBusService object lets you work with topics. The following code creates a ServiceBusService object. Add it near the top of the server.js file, after the statement to import the azure module:
var serviceBusService = azure.createServiceBusService();
By calling createTopicIfNotExists on the ServiceBusService object, the specified topic will be returned (if it exists,) or a new topic with the specified name will be created. The following code uses createTopicIfNotExists to create or connect to the topic named 'MyTopic':
serviceBusService.createTopicIfNotExists('MyTopic',function(error){
if(!error){
// Topic was created or exists
console.log('topic created or exists.');
}
});
createServiceBusService also supports additional options, which allow you to override default topic settings such as message time to live or maximum topic size. The following example shows demonstrates setting the maximum topic size to 5GB a time to live of 1 minute:
var topicOptions = {
MaxSizeInMegabytes: '5120',
DefaultMessageTimeToLive: 'PT1M'
};
serviceBusService.createTopicIfNotExists('MyTopic', topicOptions, function(error){
if(!error){
// topic was created or exists
}
});
Optional filtering operations can be applied to operations performed using ServiceBusService. Filtering operations can include logging, automatically retrying, etc. Filters are objects that implement a method with the signature:
function handle (requestOptions, next)
After doing its preprocessing on the request options, the method needs to call "next" passing a callback with the following signature:
function (returnObject, finalCallback, next)
In this callback, and after processing the returnObject (the response from the request to the server), the callback needs to either invoke next if it exists to continue processing other filters or simply invoke finalCallback otherwise to end up the service invocation.
Two filters that implement retry logic are included with the Azure SDK for Node.js, ExponentialRetryPolicyFilter and LinearRetryPolicyFilter. The following creates a ServiceBusService object that uses the ExponentialRetryPolicyFilter:
var retryOperations = new azure.ExponentialRetryPolicyFilter();
var serviceBusService = azure.createServiceBusService().withFilter(retryOperations);
Topic subscriptions are also created with the ServiceBusService object. Subscriptions are named and can have an optional filter that restricts the set of messages delivered to the subscription's virtual queue.
[AZURE.NOTE] Subscriptions are persistent and will continue to exist until either they, or the topic they are associated with, are deleted. If your application contains logic to create a subscription, it should first check if the subscription already exists by using the getSubscription method.
The MatchAll filter is the default filter that is used if no filter is specified when a new subscription is created. When the MatchAll filter is used, all messages published to the topic are placed in the subscription's virtual queue. The following example creates a subscription named 'AllMessages' and uses the default MatchAll filter.
serviceBusService.createSubscription('MyTopic','AllMessages',function(error){
if(!error){
// subscription created
}
});
You can also create filters that allow you to scope which messages sent to a topic should show up within a specific topic subscription.
The most flexible type of filter supported by subscriptions is the SqlFilter, which implements a subset of SQL92. SQL filters operate on the properties of the messages that are published to the topic. For more details about the expressions that can be used with a SQL filter, review the SqlFilter.SqlExpression syntax.
Filters can be added to a subscription by using the createRule method of the ServiceBusService object. This method allows you to add new filters to an existing subscription.
[AZURE.NOTE]
Since the default filter is applied automatically to all new subscriptions, you must first remove the default filter or the MatchAll will override any other filters you may specify. You can remove the default rule by using the deleteRule method of the ServiceBusService object.
The example below creates a subscription named 'HighMessages' with a SqlFilter that only selects messages that have a custom messagenumber property greater than 3:
serviceBusService.createSubscription('MyTopic', 'HighMessages', function (error){
if(!error){
// subscription created
rule.create();
}
});
var rule={
deleteDefault: function(){
serviceBusService.deleteRule('MyTopic',
'HighMessages',
azure.Constants.ServiceBusConstants.DEFAULT_RULE_NAME,
rule.handleError);
},
create: function(){
var ruleOptions = {
sqlExpressionFilter: 'messagenumber > 3'
};
rule.deleteDefault();
serviceBusService.createRule('MyTopic',
'HighMessages',
'HighMessageFilter',
ruleOptions,
rule.handleError);
},
handleError: function(error){
if(error){
console.log(error)
}
}
}
Similarly, the following example creates a subscription named 'LowMessages' with a SqlFilter that only selects messages that have a messagenumber property less than or equal to 3:
serviceBusService.createSubscription('MyTopic', 'LowMessages', function (error){
if(!error){
// subscription created
rule.create();
}
});
var rule={
deleteDefault: function(){
serviceBusService.deleteRule('MyTopic',
'LowMessages',
azure.Constants.ServiceBusConstants.DEFAULT_RULE_NAME,
rule.handleError);
},
create: function(){
var ruleOptions = {
sqlExpressionFilter: 'messagenumber <= 3'
};
rule.deleteDefault();
serviceBusService.createRule('MyTopic',
'LowMessages',
'LowMessageFilter',
ruleOptions,
rule.handleError);
},
handleError: function(error){
if(error){
console.log(error)
}
}
}
When a message is now sent to 'MyTopic', it will always be delivered to receivers subscribed to the 'AllMessages' topic subscription, and selectively delivered to receivers subscribed to the 'HighMessages' and 'LowMessages' topic subscriptions (depending upon the message content).
To send a message to a Service Bus topic, your application must use the sendTopicMessage method of the ServiceBusService object. Messages sent to Service Bus Topics are BrokeredMessage objects. BrokeredMessage objects have a set of standard properties (such as Label and TimeToLive), a dictionary that is used to hold custom application specific properties, and a body of string data. An application can set the body of the message by passing a string value to the sendTopicMessage and any required standard properties will be populated by default values.
The following example demonstrates how to send five test messages to 'MyTopic'. Note that the messagenumber property value of each message varies on the iteration of the loop (this will determine which subscriptions receive it):
var message = {
body: '',
customProperties: {
messagenumber: 0
}
}
for (i = 0;i < 5;i++) {
message.customProperties.messagenumber=i;
message.body='This is Message #'+i;
serviceBusService.sendTopicMessage(topic, message, function(error) {
if (error) {
console.log(error);
}
});
}
Service Bus topics support a maximum message size of 256 MB (the header, which includes the standard and custom application properties, can have a maximum size of 64 MB). There is no limit on the number of messages held in a topic but there is a cap on the total size of the messages held by a topic. This topic size is defined at creation time, with an upper limit of 5 GB.
Messages are received from a subscription using the receiveSubscriptionMessage method on the ServiceBusService object. By default, messages are deleted from the subscription as they are read; however, you can read (peek) and lock the message without deleting it from the subscription by setting the optional parameter isPeekLock to true.
The default behavior of reading and deleting the message as part of the receive operation is the simplest model, and works best for scenarios in which an application can tolerate not processing a message in the event of a failure. To understand this, consider a scenario in which the consumer issues the receive request and then crashes before processing it. Because Service Bus will have marked the message as being consumed, then when the application restarts and begins consuming messages again, it will have missed the message that was consumed prior to the crash.
If the isPeekLock parameter is set to true, the receive becomes a two stage operation, which makes it possible to support applications that cannot tolerate missing messages. When Service Bus receives a request, it finds the next message to be consumed, locks it to prevent other consumers receiving it, and then returns it to the application. After the application finishes processing the message (or stores it reliably for future processing), it completes the second stage of the receive process by calling deleteMessage method and providing the message to be deleted as a parameter. The deleteMessage method will mark the message as being consumed and remove it from the subscription.
The example below demonstrates how messages can be received and processed using receiveSubscriptionMessage. The example first receives and deletes a message from the 'LowMessages' subscription, and then receives a message from the 'HighMessages' subscription using isPeekLock set to true. It then deletes the message using deleteMessage:
serviceBusService.receiveSubscriptionMessage('MyTopic', 'LowMessages', function(error, receivedMessage){
if(!error){
// Message received and deleted
console.log(receivedMessage);
}
});
serviceBusService.receiveSubscriptionMessage('MyTopic', 'HighMessages', { isPeekLock: true }, function(error, lockedMessage){
if(!error){
// Message received and locked
console.log(lockedMessage);
serviceBusService.deleteMessage(lockedMessage, function (deleteError){
if(!deleteError){
// Message deleted
console.log('message has been deleted.');
}
}
}
});
Service Bus provides functionality to help you gracefully recover from errors in your application or difficulties processing a message. If a receiver application is unable to process the message for some reason, then it can call the unlockMessage method on the ServiceBusService object. This will cause Service Bus to unlock the message within the subscription and make it available to be received again, either by the same consuming application or by another consuming application.
There is also a timeout associated with a message locked within the subscription, and if the application fails to process the message before the lock timeout expires (e.g., if the application crashes), then Service Bus will unlock the message automatically and make it available to be received again.
In the event that the application crashes after processing the message but before the deleteMessage method is called, then the message will be redelivered to the application when it restarts. This is often called At Least Once Processing, that is, each message will be processed at least once but in certain situations the same message may be redelivered. If the scenario cannot tolerate duplicate processing, then application developers should add additional logic to their application to handle duplicate message delivery. This is often achieved using the MessageId property of the message, which will remain constant across delivery attempts.
Topics and subscriptions are persistent, and must be explicitly deleted either through the Azure Management portal or programmatically. The example below demonstrates how to delete the topic named 'MyTopic':
serviceBusService.deleteTopic('MyTopic', function (error) {
if (error) {
console.log(error);
}
});
Deleting a topic will also delete any subscriptions that are registered with the topic. Subscriptions can also be deleted independently. The following code demonstrates how to delete a subscription named 'HighMessages' from the 'MyTopic' topic:
serviceBusService.deleteSubscription('MyTopic', 'HighMessages', function (error) {
if(error) {
console.log(error);
}
});
Now that you've learned the basics of Service Bus topics, follow these links to learn more.
- See the MSDN Reference: Queues, Topics, and Subscriptions.
- API reference for SqlFilter.
- Visit the Azure SDK for Node repository on GitHub.