Nservicebus Sagas and Subscribing to Events - events

In NServiceBus 3.0.3 I have written a saga. Based on what I'm seeing in the CQRS paradigm, when we see past tense, that should coincide with an event. I want to make sure I don't have business logic in my saga. My assumption in building the saga is that it would receive events and issue commands based on the event that came in as well as certain data elements stored on the saga. The issue I'm running into is that the Saga by default cannot subscribe to published events. I've tried in the EndPointConfig setting up the IWantToRunAtStartup and in the Run method executing
Bus.Subscribe<CustomerBilledEvent>();
I've tried creating a handler in the same assembly with saga and still no dice.
My app.config for both the saga (hosted by Nservicebus.host.exe) and the publisher (a service in a console application) both have the message endpoints configured as such
<add Messages="Events.CustomerBilledEvent, Events" Endpoint="orderservice"/>
IHandleMessages has been configured on the Saga as well as the mapping has been configured on the orderid.
IHandleMessages<CustomerBilledEvent>
ConfigureMapping<CustomerBilledEvent>(s => s.OrderId, m=> m.OrderId);
I'm a little lost as to why I can't get the Saga to subscribe to this event. I understand they do not auto subscribe by default but when I look at samples under Udi and John's blogs, I see past tense being sent (IEvent?) to the saga and them issuing Bus.Send which I infer to be commands (ICommand).

So the problem is that you've set it up that your saga is trying to subscribe to the "orderservice" endpoint to be notified about the CustomerBilledEvent, but that endpoint isn't publishing it.

Related

Using transactional bus inside consumer

I have REST API gateway which calls one of the microservices with MassTransit request client. This request is not durable and is meant to live for a short time - essentially it's just replacement of "traditional" synchronous (via HTTP/GRPC/etc) gateway-microservice communication.
On microservice side I have consumer which under the hood uses DbContext and Transaction (EFC) to perform some work in database. After the work is done it should publish "WorkDoneEvent" (to be consumed later by other microservices) and return result of the work to api gateway. Event must be published atomically along with transaction used to perform the work. It does not matter if ApiGateway will receive response / will retry request - as soon as transaction is commited both work result and sending "WorkDoneEvent" must be guaranteed.
Normally this is done with transactional outbox which first saves published event to database within same transaction as the work is done. (And then some process constantly "polls" outbox and tries send message to the broker, when done it removes message from outbox). As far as I know.
MassTransit seems to have transactional outbox built in: https://masstransit-project.com/advanced/middleware/transactions.html#transactional-bus.
However in docs it clearly states:
Never use the TransactionalBus or TransactionalEnlistmentBus when writing consumers. These tools are very specific and should be used only in the scenarios described.
And this is exactly what I want to do...
Why I should not do it?
I'd suggest using the InMemoryOutbox, which is part of MassTransit. It's significantly lighter weight, is designed to work in a consumer, and will not publish your events until after the consumer has completed (but prior to acknowledging the message at the broker). The only consideration is that your consumer should be idempotent (which needs to be the case in your approach as well) and if the operation was already performed on a retry, it should republish the events.
There are videos, articles, and a sample to go along with it.

Accessing saga repository

I have the need to access the saga repository from within a consumer to read the current status of the saga correlated to the message being consumed.
Scenario:
I have an external service, when this service consumes an event coming from the saga I want to see if the saga is still in the correct state because if meanwhile the saga changed its state the consumer must skip the event.
How: I surely could query the saga repository implementation chosen by using its the native framework, but I would like to use an abstraction, an interface, to load the saga state from within the consumer, in order to be able to switch to a different repository implementation in the future.
Any help is appreciated.
If the saga initiated the command, sending it to the consumer, why would the consumer need to check the saga's state? Is there a long delay between the time the command is sent and the consumer is able to process it?
The type of check you are asking about sort of goes against what a system would generally do when processing commands. If you do need to do this type of check, I'd actually suggest a request/response interaction using the request client to which the saga would respond if the command is still valid. That way, the logic (and locking) of the saga repository remains under the saga's control.
If needed, a separate endpoint could be used for that request to ensure it isn't backed up behind other messages targeting the saga. If that is desired, post a comment and I'll update the answer.

Should we store Events in a database? (Event Driven Design)

We have several services that publishes and subscribes to Domain Events. What we usually do is log events whenever we publish and log events whenever we process events. We basically use this to apply choreography pattern.
We are not doing Event Sourcing in these systems, and there's no programmatic use for them after publishing/processing. That's the main driver we opted not to store these in a durable container, like a database or event store.
Question is, are we missing some fundamental thing by doing this?
Is storing Events a must?
I consider queued messages as system messages, even if they represent some domain event in an event-driven architecture (pub/sub messaging).
There is absolutely no hard-and-fast rule about their storage. If you would like to keep them around you could have your messaging mechanism forward them to some auditing endpoint for storage and then remove them after some time (if necessary).
You are not missing anything fundamental by not storing them.
You're definitely not missing out on anything (but there is a catch) especially if that's not a need by the business. An Event-Sourced System would definitely store all the events generated by the system into a database (or any other event-store)
The main use of an event store is to be able to restore the state of the system to the current state in case of a failure by replaying messages. To make this process of recovery faster we have snapshots.
In your case since these events are just are only relevant until the process is completed, it would not make sense to store them until you have a failure. (this is the catch) especially in a Distributed Transaction case scenario.
What I would suggest?
Don't store the event themselves but log the relevant details about these events and maybe use an ELK stack or Grafana to store these logs.
Use either the Saga Pattern or the Routing Slip pattern in case of a Distributed Transaction and log them as well.
In case a failure occurs while processing an event, put that event into an exception queue and handle it. If it's a part of a distributed transaction make sure either they all have the same TransactionId or they have a CorrelationId so you can lookup for logs and save your system.
For reliably performing your business transactions in a distributed archicture you somehow need to make sure that your events are published at least once.
So a service that publishes events needs to persist such an event within the same transaction that causes it to get created.
Considering you are publishing an event via infrastructure services (e.g. a messaging service) you can not rely on it being available all the time.
Also, your own service instance could go down after persisting your newly created or changed aggregate but before it had the chance to publish the event via, for instance, a messaging service.
Question is, are we missing some fundamental thing by doing this? Is storing Events a must?
It doesn't matter that you are not doing event sourcing. Unless it is okay from the business perspective to sometimes lose an event forever you need to temporarily persist your event with your local transaction until it got published.
You can look into the Transactional Outbox Pattern to achieve reliable event publishing.
Note: Logging/tracking your events somehow for monitoring or later analyzing/reporting purpose is a different thing and has another motivation.

Difficulty Understanding Event Sourcing Microservice Event Receiving/Communication

I've been aware of event sourcing, CQRS, DDD and micro services for a little while and I'm now at that point where I want to try and start implementing stuff and giving something a go.
I've been looking into the technical side of CQRS and I understand the DDD concepts in there. How both the write side handles commands from the UI and publishes events from it, and how the read side handles events and creates projections on them.
The difficulty I'm having is the communication & a handling events from service-to-service (both from a write to read service and between micro services).
So I want to focus on eventstore (this one: https://eventstore.com/ to be less ambiguous). This is what I want to use as I understand it is a perfect for event sourcing and the simple nature of storing the events means I can use this for a message bus as well.
So my issue falls into two questions:
Between the write and the read, in order for the read side to receive/fetch the events created from the write side, am i right in thinking something like a catch up subscription can be used to subscribe to a stream to receive any events written to it or do i use something like polling to fetch events from a given point?
Between micro services, I am having an even harder time... So when looking at CQRS tutorials/talks etc... they always seem to talk with an example of an isolated service which receives commands from the UI/API. This is fine. I understand the write side will have an API attached to it so the user can interact with it to perform commands. E.g. create a customer. However... say if I have two micro services, e.g. a order micro service and an shipping micro service, how does the shipping micro service get the events published from the order micro service. Specifically, how does those customer events, translate to commands for the shipping service.
So let's take a simple example of: - Command created from the order's API to place an order. - A OrderPlacedEvent is published to the event store. How does the shipping service listen and react to this is it need to then DispatchOrder and create ain turn an OrderDispatchedEvent.
Does the write side of the shipping microservice then need to poll or also have a catch up subscription to the order stream? If so how does an event get translated to an command using DDD approach?
something like a catch up subscription can be used to subscribe to a stream to receive any events written to it
Yes, using catch-up subscriptions is the right way of doing it. You need to keep the stream position of your subscription persisted somewhere as well.
Here you can find some sample code that works. I am not posting the whole snippet since it is too long.
The projection service startup flow is:
Load the checkpoint (first time ever it would be the stream start)
Subscribe to the stream from that checkpoint
The runtime flow will then be:
The subscription will then call the function you provide when it receives an event. There's some plumbing there to do, like if you subscribe to $all, you need to filter out system events (it will be easier in the next version of Event Store)
Project the event
Store the new checkpoint
If you make your projections idempotent, you can store the checkpoint from time to time and save some IO.
how does the shipping micro service get the events published from the order micro service
When you build a brand new system and you have a small team working on all the components, you can make a shortcut and subscribe to domain events from another service, as you'd do with projections. Within the integration context (between the boxes), ordering should not be important so you can use persistent subscriptions so you won't need to think about checkpoints. Event Store will do it for you.
Be aware that it introduces tight coupling on the domain event schema of the originating service. Your contexts will have the Partnership relationship or the downstream service will be a Conformist.
When you move forward with your system, you might decide to decouple those contexts properly. So, you introduce a stable event API for the service that publishes events for others to consume. The same subscription that you used for integration can now instead take care of translating domain (internal) events to integration (external) events. The consuming context would then use the stable API and the domain model of the upstream service will be free in iterating on their domain model, as soon as they keep the conversion up-to-date.
It won't be necessary to use Event Store for the downstream context, they could just as well use a message broker. Integration events usually don't need to be persisted due to their transient nature.
We are running a webinar series about Event Sourcing at Event Store, check our web site to get on-demand access to previous webinars and you might find interesting to join future ones.
The difficulty I'm having is the communication & a handling events from service-to-service (both from a write to read service and between micro services).
The difficulty is not your fault - the DDD literature is really weak when it comes to discussing the plumbing.
Greg Young discusses some of the issues of subscription in the latter part of his Polygot Data talk.
Eventide Project has documentation that does a decent job of explaining the principles behind how the plumbing fits things together.
Between micro services, I am having an even harder time...
The basic idea: your message store is fundamentally a database; when the host of your microservice wakes up, it queries the message store for messages after some checkpoint, and then feeds them to your domain logic (updating its own local copy of the checkpoint as needed).
So the host pulls a document with events in it from the store, and transforms that document into a stream of handle(Event) commands that ultimately get passed to your domain component.
Put another way, you build a host that polls the database for information, parses the response, and then passes the parsed data to the domain model, and writes its own checkpoints.

Microservice and RabbitMQ

I am new to Microservices and have a question with RabbitMQ / EasyNetQ.
I am sending messages from one microservice to another microservice.
Each Microservice are Web API's. I am using CQRS where my Command Handler would consume message off the Queue and do some business logic. In order to call the handler, it will need to make a request to the API method.
I would like to know without having to explicit call the API endpoint to hit the code for consuming messages. Is there an automated way of doing it without having to call the API endpoint ?
Suggestion could be creating a separate solution which would be a Console App that will execute the RabbitMQ in order to start listening. Create a while loop to read messages, then call the web api endpoint to handle business logic every time a new message is sent to the queue.
My aim is to create a listener or a startup task where once messages are in the queue it will automatically pick it up from the Queue and continue with command handler but not sure how to do the "Automatic" way as i describe it. I was thinking to utilise Azure Webjob that will continuously be running and it will act as the Consumer.
Looking for a good architectural way of doing it.
Programming language being used is C#
Much Appreciated
The recommended way of hosting RabbitMQ subscriber is by writing a windows service using something like topshelf library and subscribe to bus events inside that service on its start. We did that in multiple projects with no issues.
If you are using Azure, the best place to host RabbitMQ subscriber is in a "Worker Role".
I am using CQRS where my Command Handler would consume message off
the Queue and do some business logic. In order to call the handler, it
will need to make a request to the API method.
Are you sure this is real CQRS? CQRS occures when you handle queries and commands differently in your domain logic. Receiving a message via a calss, that's called CommandHandler and just reacting to it is not yet CQRS.
My aim is to create a listener or a startup task where once messages
are in the queue it will automatically pick it up from the Queue and
continue with command handler but not sure how to do the "Automatic"
way as i describe it. I was thinking to utilise Azure Webjob that will
continuously be running and it will act as the Consumer. Looking for
a good architectural way of doing it.
The easier you do that, the better. Don't go searching for complex solutions until you tried out all the simple ones. When I was implementing something similar, I was just running a pool of message handler scripts using Linux cron. A handler poped a message off the queue, processed it and terminated. Simple.
I think using the CQRS pattern, you will have events as well and corresponding event handlers. As you are using RabbitMQ for asynchronous communication between command and query then any message put on specific channel on RabbitMQ, can be listened by a callback method
Receiving messages from the queue is more complex. It works by subscribing a callback function to a queue. Whenever we receive a message, this callback function is called by the Pika library.

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