Azure Service Bus - cancelled scheduled messages getting re-queued

Question

I'm using the latest Java bindings (v3.1.3) for Azure Service Bus: https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-java/tree/master/sdk/servicebus

When I create a new queue client, schedule a message, and cancel it...

QueueClient sendClient = new QueueClient(new ConnectionStringBuilder(connectionString, queueName), ReceiveMode.PEEKLOCK);
long sequenceNumber = sendClient.scheduleMessage(message, instant);
...
sendClient.cancelScheduledMessage(sequenceNumber)

...the code appears to work as intended: The active message count goes to 0. But as soon as the scheduled message gets to the time it was supposed to be scheduled (I tested with 10 seconds and 100 seconds in the future), the message sometimes gets re-queued with a new sequence number. I'm not getting any errors when scheduling or cancelling the messages. Is there something I can do to make sure cancelled messages don't get re-queued?

Answer 1

From my own testing, I found that cancelling a service bus message in a short time frame after the scheduled message was sent to the service bus queue does not always process the cancellation as expected. In general we're talking only a few seconds but the behaviour is not entirely consistant.

My conslusion is that there will be some latency between the scheduled message being queued to when a cancellation of that same message is registered which means that canclelling a scheduled message almost straight away after sending it to the queue will not always stop it being processed.

Therefore in my environment, I had to provide my own fallback feature to check additional custom properties in the service bus message, so when it arrives back at my subscriber app, i use an IF Statement to check the status of the custom property so I can chose whether to ignore it and not process anything more.

This really caught me out for a little while as my environement was rather complex and I assumed there was some issue in my code somwhere along the line which in the end, once I factored in the above annomlly and started to see how the service bus was responding to the schedule message cancellation, I was able to overcome this issue.

Answer 2

You can schedule messages either by setting the ScheduledEnqueueTimeUtc property when sending a message through the regular send path, or explicitly with the ScheduleMessageAsync API. The latter immediately returns the scheduled message's SequenceNumber, which you can later use to cancel the scheduled message if needed.

Cancels the enqueuing of an already sent scheduled message, if it was not already enqueued. This is an asynchronous method returning a CompletableFuture which completes when the message is cancelled.

So, I suggest that you could use cancelScheduledMessageAsync to cancel scheduled message.