Publish/Subscribe

The Publish/Subscribe pattern allows greater flexibility in developing distributed systems by decoupling system components from each other. Once the system is capable of publishing an event, additional capabilities can be added to the system by adding a new event subscriber. A new subscriber can be added in a separate physical process, without changing or redeploying the code that publishes the message.

This sample shows how to publish an event message from a messaging endpoint in one physical process, subscribe to the event in a separate messaging endpoint in a second physical process, and execute a message handler when an event message is received.

Before running the sample, look over the solution structure, the projects and the classes. The projects Publisher and Subscriber are console applications that each host an instance of an NServiceBus messaging endpoint.

Defining messages

The Shared project contains the definition of the messages that are sent between the processes. Open "OrderReceived.cs" to see the message that will be published by this sample. Note that this event implements an interface called IEvent to denote that this message is an event. To define messages without adding a dependency to NServiceBus, use Unobtrusive Mode Messages.

Creating and publishing messages

As the name implies, the Publisher project is a publisher of event messages. It uses the NServiceBus API to publish the OrderReceived event every time the 1 key is pressed. The created message is populated and published using the Publish API.

while (true)
{
    var key = Console.ReadKey();
    Console.WriteLine();

    var orderReceivedId = Guid.NewGuid();
    if (key.Key == ConsoleKey.D1)
    {
        var orderReceived = new OrderReceived
        {
            OrderId = orderReceivedId
        };
        await endpointInstance.Publish(orderReceived)
            .ConfigureAwait(false);
        Console.WriteLine($"Published OrderReceived Event with Id {orderReceivedId}.");
    }
    else
    {
        return;
    }
}

Implementing subscribers

To receive messages from the publisher, the subscribers must subscribe to the message types they are designed to handle. A subscriber must have a handler for the type of message and a configuration that tells the endpoint where to send subscriptions for messages for transports that use message-driven publish/subscribe:

• The Subscriber handles and subscribes to the OrderReceived type.
• The handlers in each project are in files that end with the word Handler for example OrderReceivedHandler.cs.
• Subscriber uses the default auto-subscription feature of the bus where the bus automatically subscribes to the configured publisher. The auto-subscribe feature can be explicitly disabled as part of the endpoint configuration.

Run the sample

When running the sample, notice the two open console applications. Bring the Publisher endpoint to the foreground.

Click the 1 key repeatedly in the Publisher process console window and notice how the messages appear in the Subscriber console window.

Message Flow

The exact message flow may differ between unicast transports and broker transports. See the publish-subscribe documentation for further details.

Fault-tolerant messaging

Shut down Subscriber by closing its console window. Return to the Publisher process and publish a few more messages by pressing the 1 key several more times. Notice how the publishing process does not change and there are no errors even though the subscriber process is no longer running.

In Visual Studio, right-click the project of the closed subscriber. Restart it by right-clicking the Subscriber project and selecting Debug followed by Start new instance.

Note how Subscriber immediately receives the messages that were published while it was not running. The publisher safely places the message into the transport in this case LearningTransport without knowledge of the running status of any subscriber. LearningTransport safely places the message in the inbound queue of the subscriber where it awaits handling. Even when processes or machines restart, NServiceBus protects messages from being lost.