A basic walkthrough of RabbitMQ using C#.NET examples

In my last post “A trivial message loop using RabbitMQ in C#.NET” I demonstrated a simple concept of a circular message queue using RabbitMQ. I chose not to complicate the post with explaining some fundamentals of RabbitMQ leaving that for this post.

As of writing the version of RabbitMQ I am using is 2.4.1.

Some of the concepts I introduced in the last post were, and I’ll break them down in a hopefully a logical flow as steps to take.

1. IConnection
2. IModel
3. ExchangeDeclare()
4. QueueHelper.EnsureQueue()
5. Subscription
6. SimpleRpcClient
7. SimpleRpcClient.Cast()
8. Your own SimpleRpcServer
9. HandleSimpleCast

First if you’re looking to get setup on Windows head on over to the RabbitMQ official documentation and follow the steps.

Also before you continue reading I urge you to go have a look at Mike Hadlow’s EasyNeqQ API and accompanying blog posts.

Some other good blog posts I have stumbled upon after starting to write my version of this come from Simon Dixon, at the time of me writing this he had 1, 2, 3 part series

On to my take, I’ll be explaining RabbitMQ along the lines of how my simple demonstration application functions, as a reminder it’s available on BitBucket – https://bitbucket.org/NickJosevski/rabbitloop

Step 1 – The Connection

I am using ConnectionFactory with a local machine address to create the connection the client and server will use to build the next required component.

IConnection connection = new ConnectionFactory
  { 
      Address = "127.0.0.1" //localhost
  }.CreateConnection();

Step 2 – The Model

Using the connection create a model this is used to configure the rest of details on how communication will take place between the client and server.

IModel model = connection.CreateModel();

Step 3 – ExchangeDeclare()

Declaring an exchange is the concept of setting up a named path for communication, the second parameter offers options on how messages are to be delivered, in this example I’m sticking with a simple choice of ‘Direct’

var exchange = "my.exchange";
model.ExchangeDeclare(exchange, ExchangeType.Direct);

Step 4 – QueueHelper.EnsureQueue()

This is my own helper extension method to help perform a few tasks; creating a queueId, using that queueId to declare a queue on the model, and then bind the queue and exchange together, finally returning the newly created queueName.

public static class QueueHelper
{
    public static string EnsureQueue(this IModel ch, String exchangeName)
    {
        var queueId = String.Format("{0}.reply", exchangeName);
        var queueName = ch.QueueDeclare(queueId, false, false, false, null);
        ch.QueueBind(queueName, exchangeName, "", null);
        return queueName;
    }
}

Step 5 – Subscription

The subscription is supplied to the server logic and is created using the model and the queueName

var sub = Subscription(model, queueName);

Step 6 – SimpleRpcClient
Creating the client is just as simple, and we’re ready to send a message.

var client = new SimpleRpcClient(model, queueName);

Step 7 – SimpleRpcClient.Cast()

The Cast() method on the SimpleRpcClient is the asynchronous way to send a message, I want to keep this post more straight forward so I am excluding the message class and how to serialize it but those steps are very basic.

var myMsg = new SerializableClassYouHaveCreated().Serialize();

rpcClient.Cast(new BasicProperties(), myMsg);

Step 8 – NicksSimpleRpcServer

This is where things start to get a little more involved, but it’s relatively straight forward. In this approach I create my own RpcServer that extends SimpleRpcServer.

public class NicksSimpleRpcServer : SimpleRpcServer
{
    private readonly SimpleRpcClient rpcClient;

    public NicksSimpleRpcServer(Subscription subscription, SimpleRpcClient client)
    : base(subscription)
    {
        rpcClient = client;
    }

}

Step 9 – HandleSimpleCast

All I do now is override the method that handles asynchronous messages (it also needs to de-serialize the content form byte[] body). Just to follow along from my sample application the server also has a client private member so it can continue to forward a modified message on wards.

//as an override method inside NicksSimpleRpcServer:
public override void HandleSimpleCast(Boolean isRedelivered, IBasicProperties requestProperties, byte[] body)
{
    //deal with incoming message, create new message to forward
     rpcClient.Cast(new BasicProperties(), msgToForward);
}

This is where our story comes to an end… As a final step we need to get our server running…

Using the Task Parallel Library create a Task that kicks off another method of the RpcServer – MainLoop(). MainLoop simply sits there (blocks) and accepts incoming messages, each time an asynchronous arrives HandleSimpleCast will fire and the message will be processed.

var server = new NicksSimpleRpcServer(sub, client);

new Task(server.MainLoop).Start();

Hope this is easy to follow.