WebSphere Message Broker, Version 8.0.0.7 Operating Systems: AIX, HP-Itanium, Linux, Solaris, Windows, z/OS

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Application programming interfaces

WebSphere® Message Broker supports several programming interfaces that are in use by WebSphere MQ applications today; it does not provide any unique programming interfaces.

If you have existing end-user applications that are written to these interfaces, they can typically run unchanged in a broker environment. You must create the message flows to interact with these applications from the supported protocols, using the appropriate input and output nodes. WebSphere Message Broker provides built-in input and output nodes for its supported protocols and you can create your own user-defined nodes to support additional protocols.

You can also create new end-user applications to interact with the broker.

Message headers

WebSphere Message Broker provides parsers for many WebSphere MQ headers, and can therefore accept messages that contain these headers from the WebSphere MQ Enterprise Transport protocol.

Messages must include a WebSphere MQ Message Descriptor (MQMD) as the first header, which must precede user or application data in every message. The MQMD contains basic control information that must travel with the message, including:

  • The message identifier
  • The destination of the reply, if one is to be sent
  • Reply and report options (for example, confirm on delivery report)
  • The format of any following data in the message

When a message is processed by a WebSphere Message Broker broker, it typically (but not necessarily) has one or more additional headers. The header following the MQMD is always identified in the format field within the MQMD, and itself contains another format field to identify either the header that follows, or the format of the user data.

The additional headers can include:

MQRFH
The Rules and Formatting header is used by WebSphere MQ Publish/Subscribe.
MQRFH2
The MQRFH2 is an updated version of MQRFH and allows Unicode strings to be transported without translation, and it can carry numeric data types. The MQRFH2 header carries a description of the message contents, so that WebSphere Message Broker can select the correct message parser when content-based processing is carried out on the message. In addition, this header contains publish/subscribe command messages.

Use the MQRFH2 header in all new applications written for the WebSphere Message Broker environment that use a supported protocol based on WebSphere MQ technology. The MQRFH2 header must be immediately before the body of the message (that is, the last header).

If an MQRFH2 header is not included (which is normally the case of the application uses a supported protocol that is not based on WebSphere MQ technology), you must configure the message flow that processes its messages to specify the message characteristics (by setting the input node properties).

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        Last updated: 2016-05-23 14:46:01


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