Formatting the content for Service Bus messages

A message broker has to deal with scenarios where clients are using different protocol and client library versions to send and receive messages. In addition different platforms and protocols have varying support for serialization. For Windows Azure Service Bus, following are some examples of using different methods to create messages to send to Topics and Queues, and the corresponding approaches that can be used to receive the messages from Queues and Subscriptions.

If you are using REST protocol to send messages and receive them thru .NET API then you can directly manipulate the message body as:

Stream bodyStream = receiveMessage.GetBody<Stream>();

The following examples apply when using the .NET API to send and receive messages.

Example 1: Using string

When creating a BrokeredMessage with a string and the default (DataContract + Binary) serializer:

BrokeredMessage stringDefaultMessage = new BrokeredMessage("default string");

You can receive this message as:

string s = receiveMessage.GetBody<string>();

Example 2: Using Text instead of Binary XML in DataContractSerializer

When creating a BrokeredMessage with a string and a DataContractSerializer and use Text instead of Binary Xml:

BrokeredMessage stringDataContractMessage = new BrokeredMessage("DataContract string", new DataContractSerializer(typeof(string)));

You can receive this message as:

string s = receiveMessage.GetBody<string>(new DataContractSerializer(typeof(string)))

Example 3: Using raw UTF8 string

When creating a BrokeredMessage with just a raw UTF 8 string:

string utf8String = "raw UTF8 string";

BrokeredMessage utf8StringMessage = new BrokeredMessage(new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(utf8String)), true);

You can receive this message as:

string s = new StreamReader(receiveMessage.GetBody<Stream>(), Encoding.UTF8).ReadToEnd();

Example 4: Using raw UTF16

When creating a BrokeredMessage with just a raw UTF16 (“Unicode”) string:

string utf16String = "raw UTF16 string";

BrokeredMessage utf16StringMessage = new BrokeredMessage(new MemoryStream(Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(utf16String)), true);

You can receive this message as:

string s = new StreamReader(receiveMessage.GetBody<Stream>(), Encoding.Unicode).ReadToEnd();

Example 5: Using a custom DataContract

When creating a BrokeredMessage using custom DataContract type and using default serializer (DataContract + Binary Xml):

[DataContract(Namespace = "")]

class Record {

[DataMember]

public string Id { get; set; }

}

[…]

Record recordDefault = new Record { Id = "default Record" };

BrokeredMessage recordDefaultMessage = new BrokeredMessage(recordDefault);

You can receive this message as:

Record r = receiveMessage.GetBody<Record>();

Example 6: Using custom DataContract and Text

When creating a BrokeredMessage using custom DataContract type and using DataContractSerializer (will use Text Xml instead of Binary):

Record recordDataContract = new Record { Id = "DataContract Record" };

BrokeredMessage recordDataContractMessage = new BrokeredMessage(recordDataContract, new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Record)));

You can receive this message as:

Record r = receiveMessage.GetBody<Record>(new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Record)));