Consuming from Camel queue every x minutes - spring-boot

Question

Attempting to implement a way to time my consumer to receive messages from a queue every 30 minutes or so.
For context, I have 20 messages in my error queue until x minutes have passed, then my route consumes all messages on queue and proceeds to 'sleep' until another 30 minutes has passed.
Not sure the best way to implement this, I've tried spring #Scheduled, camel timer, etc and none of it is doing what I'm hoping for. I've been trying to get this to work with route policy but no dice in the correct functionality. It just seems to immediately consume from queue.
Is route policy the correct path or is there something else to use?

Answer 1

The route that reads from the queue will always read any message as quickly as it can.
One thing you could do is start / stop or suspend the route that consumes the messages, so have this sort of set up:
route 1: error_q_reader, which goes from('jms').
route 2: a timed route that fires every 20 mins
route 2 can use a control bus component to start the route.
from('timer?20mins') // or whatever the timer syntax is...
.to("controlbus:route?routeId=route1&action=start")
The tricky part here is knowing when to stop the route. Do you leave it run for 5 mins? Do you want to stop it once the messages are all consumed? There's probably a way to run another route that can check the queue depth (say every 1 min or so), and if it's 0 then shutdown route 1, you might get it to work, but I can assure you this will get messy as you try to deal with a number of async operations.
You could also try something more exotic, like a custom QueueBrowseStrategy which can fire an event to shutdown route 1 when there are no messages on the queue.

Answer 2

I built a customer bean to drain a queue and close, but it's not a very elegant solution, and I'd love to find a better one.
public class TriggeredPollingConsumer {
private ConsumerTemplate consumer;
private Endpoint consumerEndpoint;
private String endpointUri;
private ProducerTemplate producer;
private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger( TriggeredPollingConsumer.class );
public TriggeredPollingConsumer() {};
public TriggeredPollingConsumer( ConsumerTemplate consumer, String endpoint, ProducerTemplate producer ) {
this.consumer = consumer;
this.endpointUri = endpoint;
this.producer = producer;
}
public void setConsumer( ConsumerTemplate consumer) {
this.consumer = consumer;
}
public void setProducer( ProducerTemplate producer ) {
this.producer = producer;
}
public void setConsumerEndpoint( Endpoint endpoint ) {
consumerEndpoint = endpoint;
}
public void pollConsumer() throws Exception {
long count = 0;
try {
if ( consumerEndpoint == null ) consumerEndpoint = consumer.getCamelContext().getEndpoint( endpointUri );
logger.debug( "Consuming: " + consumerEndpoint.getEndpointUri() );
consumer.start();
producer.start();
while ( true ) {
logger.trace("Awaiting message: " + ++count );
Exchange exchange = consumer.receive( consumerEndpoint, 60000 );
if ( exchange == null ) break;
logger.trace("Processing message: " + count );
producer.send( exchange );
consumer.doneUoW( exchange );
logger.trace("Processed message: " + count );
}
producer.stop();
consumer.stop();
logger.debug( "Consumed " + (count - 1) + " message" + ( count == 2 ? "." : "s." ) );
} catch ( Throwable t ) {
logger.error("Something went wrong!", t );
throw t;
}
}
}
You configure the bean, and then call the bean method from your timer, and configure a direct route to process the entries from the queue.
from("timer:...")
.beanRef("consumerBean", "pollConsumer");
from("direct:myRoute")
.to(...);
It will then read everything in the queue, and stop as soon as no entries arrive within a minute. You might want to reduce the minute, but I found a second meant that if JMS as a bit slow, it would time out halfway through draining the queue.
I've also been looking at the sjms-batch component, and how it might be used with with a pollEnrich pattern, but so far I haven't been able to get that to work.

Answer 3

I have solved that by using my application as a CronJob in a MicroServices approach, and to give it the power of gracefully shutting itself down, we may set the property camel.springboot.duration-max-idle-seconds. Thus, your JMS consumer route keeps simple.
Another approach would be to declare a route to control the "lifecycle" (start, sleep and resume) of your JMS consumer route.
I would strongly suggest that you use the first approach.

Answer 4

If you use ActiveMQ you can leverage the Scheduler feature of it.
You can delay the delivery of a message on the broker by simply set the JMS property AMQ_SCHEDULED_DELAY to the number of milliseconds of the delay. Very easy in the Camel route
.setHeader("AMQ_SCHEDULED_DELAY", 60000)
It is not exactly what you look for because it does not drain a queue every 30 minutes, but instead delays every individual message for 30 minutes.
Notice that you have to enable the schedulerSupport in your broker configuration. Otherwise the delay properties are ignored.
<broker brokerName="localhost" dataDirectory="${activemq.data}" schedulerSupport="true">
...
</broker>

Answer 5

You should consider Aggregation EIP
from(URI_WAITING_QUEUE)
.aggregate(new GroupedExchangeAggregationStrategy())
.constant(true)
.completionInterval(TIMEOUT)
.to(URI_PROCESSING_BATCH_OF_EXCEPTIONS);
This example describes the following rules: all incoming in URI_WAITING_QUEUE objects will be grouped into List. constant(true) is a grouping condition (wihout any). And every TIMEOUT period (in millis) all grouped objects will be passed into URI_PROCESSING_BATCH_OF_EXCEPTIONS queue.
So the URI_PROCESSING_BATCH_OF_EXCEPTIONS queue will deal with List of objects to process. You can apply Split EIP to split them and to process one by one.