How do you replay missed messages when using STOMP to connect to RabbitMQ?

Question

I've got an iOS application which uses a STOMP Client to talk to RabbitMQ. The application loads a lot of state during startup, and then keeps that state in sync by receiving updates published on STOMP. Of course, if it loses its connection, it can no longer be sure it's in sync, and therefore has to re-load that large initial blob. Any kind of network interruption triggers this behavior and makes my customers sad.

There are a lot of big-picture ways to fix this (and I'm working on them) but in the meantime, I'm trying to use persistent queues to solve this problem. The idea is that the server will create a queue, bind it to the appropriate topics, and then start building the large startup bundle. When finished, it will hand everything off to the client. The client will set itself up with the startup bundle, open a subscription to the queue, and then process any updates which happened while the server was getting things ready. Similarly, if the client should become disconnected, it can simply reconnect and resume reading the messages it finds in the queue.

My problem is that while the client successfully receives messages sent after it connects, if there were any messages in the queue before it connected, they are not read. Likewise, if the client becomes disconnected, when it reconnects, it won't see any messages which arrived while it was away.

Can anyone suggest how I might get the client to be able to read those missing messages?

Answer 1

It turns out what was happening was that the STOMP adapter was consuming the messages but failing to deliver them. Thus, when the client reconnected, it wouldn't have any messages waiting for it.

To fix the problem, I changed the "ack" setting on the subscribe request to "client", meaning that STOMP shouldn't consider the message delivered until the client sends back an ACK frame. By changing my client appropriately, messages now get delivered even after the client has been away.