How to remove messages from a topic

Question

I am trying to write an Application that uses the JMS publish subscribe model. However I have run into a setback, I want to be able to have the publisher delete messages from the topic. The usecase is that I have durable subscribers, the active ones will get the messages (since it's more or less instantly) , but if there are inactive ones and the publisher decides the message is wrong, I want to have him able to delete the message so that the subscribers won't receive it anymore once they become active. Problem is, I don't know how/if this can be done. For a provider I settled on glassfish's implementation, but if other alternatives offer this functionality, I can switch.

Thank you.

Answer 1

JMS is a form of asynchronous messaging and as such the publishers and subscribers are decoupled by design. This means that there is no mechanism to do what you are asking. For subscribers who are active at time of publication, they will consume the message with no chance of receiving the delete message in time to act on it. If a subscriber is offline then they will but async messages are supposed to be atomic. If you proceed with design of other respondent's answer (create a delete message and require reconnecting consumers to read the entire queue looking for delete messages), then you will create a situation in which the behavior of the system differs based on whether or not a subscriber was online or not at the time a specific message/delete combination was was published. There is also a race condition in which the subscriber completes reading of the retained messages just before the publisher sends out the delete message. This means you must put significant logic into subscribers to reconcile these conditions and even more to reconcile the race condition.

The accepted method of doing this is what are called "compensating transactions." In any system where the producer and consumer do not share a single unit of work or share common state (such as using the same DB to store state) then backing out or correcting a previous transaction requires a second transaction that reverses the first. The consumer must of course be able to apply the compensating transaction correctly. When this pattern is used the result is that all subscribers exhibit the same behavior regardless of whether the messages are consumed in real time or in a batch after the consumer has restarted.

Note that a compensating transaction differs from a "delete message." The delete message as proposed in the other respondent's answer is a form of command and control that affects the message stream itself. On the other hand, compensating transactions affect the state of the system through transactional updates of the system state.

As a general rule, you never want to manage state of the system by manipulating the message stream with command and control functions. This is fragile, susceptible to attack and very hard to audit or debug. Instead, design the system to deliver every message subject to its quality of service constraints and to process all messages. Handle state changes (including reversing a prior action) entirely in the application.

As an example, in banking where transactions trigger secondary effects such as overdraft fees, a common procedure is to "memo post" the transactions during the day, then sort and apply them in a batch after the bank has closed. This allows a mistake to be reconciled before it causes overdraft fees. More recently, the transactions are applied in real time but the triggers are withheld until the day's books close and this achieves the same result.

Answer 2

JMS API does not allow removing messages from any destination (either queue or topic). Although I believe that specific JMX providers provide their own proprietary tools to manage their state for example using JMX. Try to check it out for your JMS provider but be careful: even if you find solution it will not be portable between different JMS providers.

One legal way to "remove" message is using its time-to-live: publish(Topic topic, Message message, int deliveryMode, int priority, long timeToLive). Probably it is good enough for you.

If it is not applicable for your application, solve the problem on application level. For example attach unique ID to each message and publish special "delete" message with higher priority that will be a kind of command to delete "real" message with the same ID.