IBM MQ: My first try at topic trees

Posted by on October 29, 2018

There is a lot of texts and pictures out there talking about topic trees but I have had a hard time finding any complete examples, so to better get a grip on what topic trees are and how I can use them I created this small example.

Goal: To be able to subscribe to multiple topics of similar entity types using only one subscription

Let’s get right into the tree building. I’m here going to use the runmqsc program but you can use MQExplorer if you like a GUI 

DEFINE TOPIC(PRICES) TOPICSTR('/prices')
DEFINE TOPIC(FRUITS) TOPICSTR('/prices/fruits')
DEFINE TOPIC(APPLE)  TOPICSTR('/prices/fruit/apple')
DEFINE TOPIC(ORANGE) TOPICSTR('/prices/fruit/orange')
DEFINE TOPIC(TOYS)   TOPICSTR('/prices/toys')
DEFINE TOPIC(PUZZLE) TOPICSTR('/prices/toys/puzzle')
DEFINE TOPIC(CUBE)   TOPICSTR('/prices/toys/cube')

These commands will give you a tree looking like this

                     prices
                    /      \
               fruits       toys
              /     \      /    \
          orange  apple  cube  puzzle

And now I’m going to try to show the “magic” this brings

Tests
A. Subscribe to TOPICSTR(‘/prices/#’) will get you ALL messages published on ANY topic string in this tree
B. Subscribe to TOPICSTR(‘/prices/toys/#’) will get you messages published on ‘/prices/toys’, ‘/prices/toys/cube’ and ‘/prices/toys/puzzle’. No other
C. Subscribe to TOPICSTR(‘/prices/fruit/orange/#’) will get you messages published on ‘/prices/fruit/orange’ only. No other

Pure magic!

Tested on IBM MQ v9.0.5.0 on Red Hat Linux 7.5

IBM MQ

Comments are closed.