Question

I do not understand how to handle errornous messages when using a JMS topic. I have a persistent JMS Topic with 4 subscribers. I send a message to the topic. 3 of the subscribers consume the message successfully, one fails. After some retries the message is put in the dead letter queue (DLQ).

The question is, how to continue from there.

1. How can I find out which subscriber failed?

2. How can I redeliver the message only to that subscriber? I cannot just put it into the topic again, since all subscribers would get it then.

Are there some best practices to handle this case?

If that matters, I use Glassfish 3.1.2 with an openMQ. I would prefer to use a solution that is not specific to the implementation of the messaging provider.

Thanks in advance for your answer.
Cheers
Arne

Answer 1

Well, I’m not very familiar with openmq, but a lot of jms providers have an ability to forward messages from topic to queues. So the message producer sends messages to a topic, then jms provider forwards a separate copy of a message to a separate queue for each consumer. Each consumer has its own DLQ.

There are the following benefits:

1. Guaranteed SLA for each queue consumer (for example, slow consumer can slow down other consumers, in case with separate queues that’s not so).
2. There will no a consumer that can lose a message (topics with durable subscriptions will deliver only messages after you firstly subscribe to this topic).
3. Some problems with clustering can be solved easily (subscribers (MDBs) to the topics in a clustered environment as a rule will receive messages as many times as a count of nodes in the cluster)