Temporarily hiding a message in azure service bus queue/topic

Question

I have a scenario where some of the messages depend no the completion of another messages to be completed. So there is a precondition for a set of messages to be processed that another message should be processed first. The precondition message is a long running process which can take up to 30 minutes to process.

What I would like is to hide a message for lets say 5 minutes from all the subscribers when I sense that precondition is not complete and then after 5 minutes it is available again and hidden for next 5 minutes if cant be processed and so on.

I can see that I can use sessions and defer could be solution but I do not want to go that way. Since that will require to maintain a storage to keep the defered messages in a non queue storage.

Another way could be that I do a peak lock on the message and then leave it alone and let the lock expire so that in due time it will reappear in the queue.

Is there a better way of doing this?

Answer 1

There are a couple ways to achieve this. When you get a message to can choose to Defer it. This will remove it from the active queue and you will have to later ask for this message specifically with a MessageId. For your scenario it may be possible to use Scheduled messages (see below) but that will involve receiving the message and then scheduling another one using the following: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/microsoft.servicebus.messaging.brokeredmessage.scheduledenqueuetimeutc.aspx