mqtt client subcribing to multiple subscriptions. whats the best way? - mqtt

I am building a javascript app which is going to be a mqtt client. It needs to subscribe to multiple topics. I can see that there are two ways to implement this.
Make multiple client connections. On each client connection subscribe on a single topic. Then the onMessage handler will be fired on that client for that topic only. This means I will have multiple mqtt connections.
Make a single client connection. Subscribe to multiple topics on that one client. Then when onMessage fires, I need to inspect the message.topic and route that message to the subscriber callback method which subscribed to that topic and I need to cater for the # and * wildcards.
Currently I am implementing method #2. But I would like to get your opinions on which is the best method and why.

Option 1 is REALLY not a good idea, it just makes so much extra work, maintaining the connection for all the separate clients and adds extra overhead to the broker.

Related

MQTT message subscription "all except me"

I'm writing a ServiceBus over MQTT protocol for a personal project.
I would basically like to subscribe every messages except the ones that comes from my instance.
I thought about doing a application side check, adding a "SenderId" property in my message.
But it has a considerable overhead in bandwidth consumption and also in compute time cause I have to check every single message if I'm the sender
I'm using basic topic family/message layout nothing complicated
I thought about using some kind of topic layout like : family/message/{senderIdHere}
But it looks like I'm wrong somewhere cause I would like to subscribe all
Here is a small example. That "EventPipeline" is somehow necessary to reduce code duplication between internal instance handling and over service bus handling
If anyone have some great hints,
Thanks by advance.
MQTT doesn't work that way, if you subscribe to a topic you normally get everything published to that topic.
The one possible option I can think of is to have everything publish to it's own sub topic e.g. family/message/{senderIdHere} and subscribe to the wildcard family/message/#
Then use ACLs to allow each user to publish (write) to their subtopic, but not be able to subscribe (read) from it. This will have the broker filter the messages for you.
Edit:
MQTT v5 introduced an option when subscribing to a topic to ignore the publisher's own messages. But this does require both the broker and the client to be using MQTT v5

How to get all messages sent to a Smooch appid without using webhooks?

Using the Smooch API, I am trying to obtain all of the messages sent to my Facebook appid in the past few minutes or hours.
The Get Messages REST method does exactly what I need, except for that it only returns messages from a particular appUserId. This isn't useful unless you already know what users have sent you messages. I cannot use a webhook as the application resides behind a corporate firewall. Opening the firewall to connections that originate from the outside is not an option (even with white-listing).
Is there a way to invoke the Get Messages REST method such that it will ignore the appUserId filter? Perhaps some sort of wildcard character?
GET {{url}}/{{apiVersion}}/apps/{{appId}}/appusers/{{appUserId}}/messages
Unfortunately you do need to have the appUserId (or userId) on hand in order to query user messages.
Webhooks are a pretty essential part of building a Smooch integration. If you can't receive them through your firewall, then you might consider building an intermediary service outside of your corporate network for receiving Smooch webhooks. For each webhook event you receive it would either:
Forward it through a secure tunnel into your coprorate network
Store the appUserId (or the whole event) in its own database, and provide a secure endpoint that allows your corporate network service to query that data
I'm curious to know more about your use case, e.g which Smooch channels are you integrating? With more details I might be able to improve this answer.
#alavers We would like to leverage nearly every messaging integration you offer.
#alavers You may want to consider providing a Get Messages variant that is better suited for use within a corporate firewall environment. An excellent example is the http long poll implementation provided by APIs such Amazon's SQS API. Their receiveMessage method waits for up to the specified time period but returns as soon as a message is received. This provides nearly the same performance of a webhook but eliminates the need for a customer to open their corporate firewall to connections that originate from outside the corporation. Most IT departments will approve connections that originate from within the corporation, but permitting connections that originate from the outside becomes a very difficult sell.

Does MQTT Support User to User Messages

I know that using MQTT topics devices can subscribe to them. But is there any way that a IoT device can send some message to a target IoT device (by device id or something) without using a topic or is there any standard topic for this scenario?
There is no way to communicate without a topic, but you can create a topic for any purpose. So typically if you wanted to send a message to another client, you would publish it somewhere in the hierarchy of topics to which that client is subscribed.
That could be as simple as something like device/12345/inbound or whatever you prefer. And because topics can have hierarchy, in addition to whatever detail you put in the body, you can also encode categorization of your message into the topic, much as RESTful APIs often do in a URL.
A good reason for using target-specific (or owner-account-specific) topics is that the most easy solutions for MQTT security compartmentalization are topic-scope.

how to sanitize mqtt message payload in server side?

I made an instant messaging app using MQTT protocol.
I want to add some extra data about messages in payload like sent time ( server time not client time ) and also provide kind of server side payload sanitizing.
Is it a good idea to add a third party client with superuser privileges between message sender and message receiver on broker's local machine to do this job ?
or is there any better idea ?
by the way I'm using EMQTT as message broker.
From a pure security view having direct peer to peer traffic (without filtering and sanitising) sounds like a dangerous idea. (At least in the Internet-of-things domain I would clearly object against it.)
Why? Because the clients are outside of your control (i.e. a hacker can re-engineer) and inject any traffic to exploit security holes on the receiving side of other clients.
So sanitising on the server side sounds like a very good idea.
I would suggest two topics: One (inbound) topic the clients use to publish messages, and another (outbound) topic used by clients to subscribe to messages. A server side component would then read the messages from inbound topic, sanitize it and publish to the outbound topic.
This de-coupeling makes it also easier to introduce MQTT payload changed: If you update the payload in a non-compatible way, introduce a new inbound topic and keep the old inbound topic too. This allows you to support old and new clients during the transition phase.

Need to poll Mqtt broker from a java REST API for already published messages to MQTT

I am looking for a solution to poll messages from MQTT broker. I will describe the solution briefly here.
We have a Spring based Controller class which exposes REST APIs to handle certain vehicle related diagnostics data. Through one of these API-s Notify3P() I create a MQTT java client and publish messages based on some input data to the MQTT broker on a given topic. My requirement is to notify a third-party system every time the client publishes a message on MQTT.
The 3P system is going to pick up the message from MQTT once it receives the notification. It then needs to get the message from the MQTT broker through a getMessage() REST API (which we need to expose on the above controller class). The getMessage() API needs to poll MQTT for the messages that have already been published and hand it to the 3P system. The 3P system would then do some processing and send back a response to our system through another REST API postMessage() exposed on our controller class. The postMessage() should post the message on the response topic on MQTT. I need another REST API checkResponse() which then polls the response topic of MQTT and send back the response to the client.
What I have done so far: On application start up I have a start up bean which listens to MQTT request and response topics. Now I publish data to request topic using the REST API Notify3P(). I have attached a callback with the startup bean which gets the message. The problem comes when the 3P needs to call my controller to poll message from MQTT.
I am not clear how to hold back messages on MQTT and consume it on demand. Is there a mechanism to do it in MQTT? Also once the 3P system post messages on the response then again how do I poll the response topic to pick up the response from MQTT and send to clients of my Controller?
I hope the problem description makes sense. If there is any solution from anyone please post it. Any sample code would of great help.
Thanks in advance!!
You may have got the idea of MQTT a bit confused. One of the key points is that there is no polling.
You subscribe to your response topic and publish to the request topic. As soon as a response is available you will be sent it by the broker. You can't hold back messages.
It sounds like your controller also needs to talk MQTT. If it is subscribed to the response topic from the start then it will receive the messages and you can do with them what you will, no need for polling.
To achieve exactly what you want, where the third party notifies the controller to read messages from MQTT then the controller would need to be able to use MQTT anyway. At that point you might as well do it "properly". If you don't want to integrate MQTT into your controller, then you can't do what you describe and you will have to come up with another means of communicating between the two components.
Summary - get your controller to talk MQTT if you can.

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