Can existence of subscribers to an endpoint be detected in Solace - solace

Does Solace have some API call (possibly administrative) by which it can be determined that a topic or queue has at least one "alive" subscriber? For example, a call to return the count of active subscriptions on the topic?
The use case is determining, in a request/reply scenario, whether there is a server "listening" to the relevant endpoint. (Clearly, it would be pointless for a client to send a request if there is no server to respond. Instead, some form of remedial action would be called for.)

Solace does not have an API call that can be used to determine if whether a topic has any subscribers. Similarly, there isn't also any API calls that can be used to determine if a queue has any active consumers.
Instead, what can be done is to enable the "Reject Msg To Sender On No Subscription Match" property on the Client Profile.
When that property is enabled, any Guaranteed Messages that are published to a topic with no subscribers on the Message VPN will be rejected with a "No Subscription Match" error.
However, do note that if the topic subscription of any queue on the Message VPN matches the topic that the Guaranteed Messages are being published to, then the messages will not be rejected with the "No Subscription Match" error. Instead, these messages will be spooled to the queue.

Related

MQTT paho client publish message and delete immediately the receiver consumes it

I have been trying to work with paho mqtt client to publish and receive messages with mosquitto as the broker and works fine. My use case although involves the sender publishing a message to the broker and disconnects, at this point, the receiver whether connected or disconnected should consume this message and delete it immediately. I have played with all the properties e.g QOS, retained messages, clean sessions, etc but none is yielding the result I want. Please help.
Assuming a Publish and Subscription at QOS2 the message will only ever be delivered to the subscriber once, there is nothing to delete from anywhere.
If you are trying to ensure that the message is only ever consumed by one specific client then I think you have a misunderstanding about what MQTT is.
MQTT is a PUB/SUB protocol, and as such is designed to totally decouple the subscriber from the publisher. The publisher doesn't know how many subscribers there are, just that it has published a message to a given topic.
0 to N (where N can be any number) of clients can subscribe to the topic. Using QOS, persistent subscriptions and the clean session flag, a client can indicate to the broker that it would like to receive any messages published since was last connected, but this will not influence any other clients that may have also subscribed to that topic.
Starting at MQTT protocol v5 (most brokers and clients currently still only support v3 as of Sept 2018) includes something called Shared Subscriptions* that can be used to round-robin deliver messages on a give topic to a group of clients so only 1 of the set will receive this message, but this does not prevent clients not part of the group from also receiving the message.
The last message with the retained flag set published to a topic will be delivered to all clients at the point they subscribe to the topic. This message can be cleared by publishing a new message with a null payload and the retained flag set. A client could publish a message like this as soon as it receives the retained message but there would still be a timing window where other clients may subscribe and receive the retained message.
*some v3 brokers have implemented propriety versions of this.

How to know the remote device is online using mqtt

How to know the remote device is online using mqtt (as a device simulator I am using MQTTfx). After publishing to a topic I am not getting any acknowledgement message and in the callbacks I am getting the same payload data that is published.
You can not find out is another MQTT client is online at a protocol level, in fact at a Pub/Sub pattern level a publishing client should not care is 0 or an infinite number of other clients are subscribed to the topic that message is published on.
The callbacks are only an indication that the message has been successfully delivered to the broker not to any of the subscribers. There is no end to end delivery notification (because there may be no subscribers to a given topic).
If you need to know the status of devices then you need to implement this yourself, the usual pattern is to use a status topic with a retained message and the LWT to clear this if the client crashes and setting it manually when it starts up or shuts down cleanly.

Persistent Message Delivery Mode when a Queue subscribes to a Topic

I have a queue subscribing from a topic. My MQTT client publishes messages to the topic. My Java program consumes messages from the queue using JCSMP API. However, I notice that the delivery mode of the messages received by my Java program from the Queue is DIRECT or sometimes NON-PERSISTENT. So, does this mean my messages will not be spooled to SAN? Is it possible for me to set topic subscription for my queue so that all messages received from the topic and stored in this queue will be persistent?
Thank you.
When the Solace appliance receives a message that was published to a topic that matches a topic subscription set on a queue, the message will be delivered to the queue and spooled. If this message is originally set with a DIRECT delivery mode, the delivery mode will be promoted to NON-PERSISTENT. NON-PERSISTENT messages are treated as a Guaranteed Message and will be spooled.
If you are receiving a NON-PERSISTENT message, the message was properly spooled on the queue.
When the Solace appliance receives a message that was published to a topic that matches a topic subscription applied directly on a client, they message will not be spooled and will be delivered directly to the client without being queued. If this message is originally published with a NON-PERSISTENT or PERSISTENT delivery mode, it will be demoted and received by the client as DIRECT.
If you are receiving messages with a delivery mode of DIRECT, verify that the client is not directly subscribed to the topic. The topic should be applied on the queue that the client is bound to instead.

Receive offline messages mqtt

I'm using mosquitto as broker and paho(python) as client. I'm trying to make subscriber to receive offline messages.
For that I made following changes:
Fixed client ID
qos level 2
but, still the subscriber is not able to receive messages.
any help?
Thanks,
Rahul
In order to have your client as a durable client and receive messages that were sent to topics when it was offline, you need to meet the following criteria:
Fixed client ID (as you've done)
Always connect with clean_session=False
Subscriptions must be made with QoS>0
Messages published must have QoS>0
The mistake that I make most frequently is to forget either one of points 3 and 4, so I'm publishing with QoS=0 or subscribing with QoS=0, either of which would cause messages not to be stored.
You could also look at the queue_qos0_messages option to tell the broker to store QoS=0 messages as well. Note that this is an implementation detail that may be specific to mosquitto.
Check if you have set the retain flag to true when publishing message to topic, with retain=true, new connected client which subscribes the topic will receive the retained message.

MQTT messageId practical implementation

The company I am working for has evaluated MQTT and decided to use it as a core messaging platform for a large scale system. The main reason is how compact the protocol is and how easy it can actually be implemented. I have a single issue with MQTT though and I'm seeking for an answer to the following question:
QoS1 and QoS2 messages require confirmation from the client. The only thing I know about the message (identifying it) when receiving PUBACK, PUBREC, PUBREL and PUBCOMP is messageId and the clientId. Message id is an unsigned int16 so the max value is 65535. It doesn't seem to be large enough for long running clients, say a year, sending 15 QoS2 messages an hour.
I am not quite sure if there's any other way to identify the message? I would like to be as compliant with the standard as possible.
Probably the first point to make clear is that message IDs are handled on a per client and per direction basis. That is to say that the broker will create a message ID for each outgoing message with QoS>0 for each client that is connected and these message IDs will be completely independent of any other message IDs used for the same message published to other clients. Likewise, each client generates its own message IDs for messages that it sends.
The message ID doesn't have to be unique, so your client sending 15 messages per hour with QoS level 2 would simply overflow at some point. The real limitation is that there can only be a maximum of 65535 messages per direction "in flight" at once (i.e. part way through the message handshake). Once a message with a given ID has been fully processed then that message ID can be reused.
Another way of looking at it is to consider how it would work if your client only ever had one message in flight at once, whether because of the rate the messages are being transmitted or by design in the way you handle the messages. In this case, you could keep message ID set to 1 for every single message because there is never a chance that there will be a duplicate.
If you wish to support having multiple messages in flight at once it would be relatively straightforward to check there are no message ID duplicates before you assign a new one.
Because the message ID is per client, if you send a single message to >65535 clients there will be no chance of message ID collisions. If you send >65535 messages to each client at once and the message flows aren't complete then there will be problems.
Answering the comment "I have noticed that every MQTT broker tends to deliver only the last QoS1/2 message":
The broker will only send messages to clients it knows about. If you connect for the first time there is no way to get messages from the past, with one exception: retained messages. If a message is set to retained then it is a "last known good" value. When a new client subscribes it will be sent the retained message immediately which makes it useful for things that are updated infrequently. I suspect this is what you are referring to. If you want a client to have messages queued when it is not connected then you must connect with the "clean session" option disabled to make the client persistent. You must also use QoS>0 subscriptions and QoS>0 publications. When your client reconnects (with clean session still set to disabled), the queued messages will be delivered. You can normally configure the number of messages to queue in this way in the broker, where any further messages will be discarded. An important point is that queueing messages for a client that has not previously connected is not supported by design.
For delivering more messages at QOS1 or QOS2, you should use concept of persistant memory. In this when ever a subscriber is not available the message get stored in persistant memory and deliver once subscriber is connected. You can do this at QOS0 also after configuring mosquitto.conf file.

Resources