Consumer Cancel Notification

Overview

When a channel is consuming from a queue, there are various reasons which could cause the consumption to stop. One of these is obviously if the client issues a basic.cancel on the same channel, which will cause the consumer to be cancelled and the server replies with a basic.cancel-ok. Other events, such as the queue being deleted, or in a clustered scenario, the node on which the queue is located failing, will cause the consumption to be cancelled, but the client channel will not be informed, which is frequently unhelpful.

To solve this, we have introduced an extension in which the broker will send to the client a basic.cancel in the case of such unexpected consumer cancellations. This is not sent in the case of the broker receiving a basic.cancel from the client. AMQP 0-9-1 clients don't by default expect to receive basic.cancel methods from the broker asynchronously, and so in order to enable this behaviour, the client must present a capabilities table in its client-properties in which there is a key consumer_cancel_notify and a boolean value true. See the section on capabilities for details.

Our supported clients present this capability by default to the broker and thus will be sent the asynchronous basic.cancel method by the broker, which they present to the consumer callback. For example, in our Java client, the Consumer interface has a handleCancel callback, which can be overridden by sub-classing the DefaultConsumer class:

channel.queueDeclare(queue, false, true, false, null);
Consumer consumer = new DefaultConsumer(channel) {
    @Override
    public void handleCancel(String consumerTag) throws IOException {
        // consumer has been cancelled unexpectedly
    }
};
channel.basicConsume(queue, consumer);

It is not an error for the client to issue a basic.cancel for a consumer which has been unexpectedly cancelled (e.g. due to queue deletion). By definition, there is a race possible between a client issuing a basic.cancel, and the broker sending out the asynchronous notification. In such cases, the broker does not error when it receives the basic.cancel and replies with a basic.cancel-ok as normal.

Consumer Cancellation and Replicated Queues

Clients supporting consumer cancel notification will always be informed when a queue is deleted or becomes unavailable. Consumers may request that they should be cancelled when the leader of a replicated queue changes.