Chapter 37. Duplicate Message Detection

37.1. Using Duplicate Detection for Message Sending
37.2. Configuring the Duplicate ID Cache
37.3. Duplicate Detection and Bridges
37.4. Duplicate Detection and Cluster Connections

HornetQ includes powerful automatic duplicate message detection, filtering out duplicate messages without you having to code your own fiddly duplicate detection logic at the application level. This chapter will explain what duplicate detection is, how HornetQ uses it and how and where to configure it.

When sending messages from a client to a server, or indeed from a server to another server, if the target server or connection fails sometime after sending the message, but before the sender receives a response that the send (or commit) was processed successfully then the sender cannot know for sure if the message was sent successfully to the address.

If the target server or connection failed after the send was received and processed but before the response was sent back then the message will have been sent to the address successfully, but if the target server or connection failed before the send was received and finished processing then it will not have been sent to the address successfully. From the senders point of view it's not possible to distinguish these two cases.

When the server recovers this leaves the client in a difficult situation. It knows the target server failed, but it does not know if the last message reached its destination ok. If it decides to resend the last message, then that could result in a duplicate message being sent to the address. If each message was an order or a trade then this could result in the order being fulfilled twice or the trade being double booked. This is clearly not a desirable situation.

Sending the message(s) in a transaction does not help out either. If the server or connection fails while the transaction commit is being processed it is also indeterminate whether the transaction was successfully committed or not!

To solve these issues HornetQ provides automatic duplicate messages detection for messages sent to addresses.

37.1. Using Duplicate Detection for Message Sending

Enabling duplicate message detection for sent messages is simple: you just need to set a special property on the message to a unique value. You can create the value however you like, as long as it is unique. When the target server receives the message it will check if that property is set, if it is, then it will check in its in memory cache if it has already received a message with that value of the header. If it has received a message with the same value before then it will ignore the message.

Note

Using duplicate detection to move messages between nodes can give you the same once and only once delivery guarantees as if you were using an XA transaction to consume messages from source and send them to the target, but with less overhead and much easier configuration than using XA.

If you're sending messages in a transaction then you don't have to set the property for every message you send in that transaction, you only need to set it once in the transaction. If the server detects a duplicate message for any message in the transaction, then it will ignore the entire transaction.

The name of the property that you set is given by the value of org.hornetq.api.core.HDR_DUPLICATE_DETECTION_ID, which is _HQ_DUPL_ID

The value of the property can be of type byte[] or SimpleString if you're using the core API. If you're using JMS it must be a String, and its value should be unique. An easy way of generating a unique id is by generating a UUID.

Here's an example of setting the property using the core API:

...     

ClientMessage message = session.createMessage(true);

SimpleString myUniqueID = "This is my unique id";   // Could use a UUID for this

message.setStringProperty(HDR_DUPLICATE_DETECTION_ID, myUniqueID);

...

And here's an example using the JMS API:

...     

Message jmsMessage = session.createMessage();

String myUniqueID = "This is my unique id";   // Could use a UUID for this

message.setStringProperty(HDR_DUPLICATE_DETECTION_ID.toString(), myUniqueID);

...