What is an elegant way of halting consumption of messages gracefully in the C# client for RabbitMQ?

Question

I am setting up a standard standalone thread listening to RabbitMQ in C#. Suppose the method for listening in the thread looks like this:

public void Listen()
{
    using (var channel = connection.CreateModel())
    {
        var consumer = SetupQueues(channel);
        while (true)
        {
            var ea = consumer.Queue.Dequeue();    // blocking call
            handler.HandleMessage(channel, ea);
        }
    }
}

What is an elegant way of halting consumption of messages gracefully in the C# client for RabbitMQ? Keep in mind I have found nothing of use in the RabbitMQ examples/docs or these SO questions:

• How to stop consuming message from selective queue - RabbitMQ
• How to pause and resume consumption gracefully in rabbitmq, pika python
• What is the best way to safely end a java application with running RabbitMQ consumers

The issue here is consumer.Queue.Dequeue() is a blocking call. I have tried these options:

• Calling channel.BasicCancel(string tag). This causes a System.IO.EndOfStreamException in the blocking call. I do not want to use this exception as part of the control flow for obvious reasons.

• Calling consumer.Queue.Dequeue(int millisecondsTimeout, out T result) and checking a flag in between loop iterations. This can work but seems hacky.

I want to let the thread exit gracefully and clean up any unmanaged resources I might have, so no thread aborting, etc.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

The DeQueue with the timeout & flag is the way to do it. It's a very common pattern, and is why many blocking calls are provided with timeout-enabled versions.

Alternately, throwing a (known) exception isn't necessarily a bad thing for control flow. Gracefully shutting down could mean actually trapping the exception, commenting "this is thrown when requesting the channel shuts down", and then returning cleanly. This is how part of TPL works with the CancellationToken.