EasyNetQ: Multiple Handlers per Consumer

A common feature request for EasyNetQ has been to have some way of implementing a command pipeline pattern. Say you’ve got a component that is emitting commands. In a .NET application each command would most probably be implemented as a separate class. A command might look something like this:

public class AddUser
{
    public string Username { get; private set; }
    public string Email { get; private set; }

    public AddUser(string username, string email) 
    {
        Username = username;
        Email = email;
    }
}

Another component might listen for commands and act on them. Previously in EasyNetQ it would have been difficult to implement this pattern because a consumer (Subscriber) was always bound to a given message type. You would have had to use the lower level IAdvancedBus binary message methods and implement your own serialization and dispatch infrastructure.

But now EasyNetQ comes with multiple handlers per consumer out of the box.

From version 0.20 there’s a new overload of the Consume method that provides a fluent way for you to register multiple message type handlers to a single consumer, and thus a single queue.

Here’s an example:

bus = RabbitHutch.CreateBus("host=localhost");

var queue = bus.Advanced.QueueDeclare("multiple_types");

bus.Advanced.Consume(queue, x => x
        .Add<AddUser>((message, info) => 
            { 
                Console.WriteLine("Add User {0}", message.Body.Username);
            })
        .Add<DeleteUser>((message, info) =>
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Delete User {0}", message.Body.Username);
            })
    );

Now we can publish multiple message types to the same queue:

bus.Advanced.Publish(Exchange.GetDefault(), queue.Name, false, false, 
    new Message<AddUser>(new AddUser("Steve Howe", "[email protected]"))));
bus.Advanced.Publish(Exchange.GetDefault(), queue.Name, false, false, 
    new Message<DeleteUser>(new DeleteUser("Steve Howe")));

By Default, if a matching handler cannot be found for a message, EasyNetQ will throw an exception. You can change this behaviour, and simply ignore messages that do not have a handler, by setting the ThrowOnNoMatchingHandler property to false, like this:

bus.Advanced.Consume(queue, x => x
        .Add<AddUser>((message, info) => 
            { 
                Console.WriteLine("Add User {0}", message.Body.Username);
            })
        .Add<DeleteUser>((message, info) =>
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Delete User {0}", message.Body.Username);
            })
        .ThrowOnNoMatchingHandler = false
    );

Very soon there will be a send/receive pattern implemented at the IBus level to make this even easier. Watch this space!

Happy commanding!