Updating a Brokered Message already on an Azure Service Bus Queue

Question

We want to be able to hold a property in a Service Bus Queue Brokered Message that stores the status of the item; so in the cases where an item is reprocessed for whatever reason we have a record indicating where in the process it had got to (improving our retry logic).

So we have the below code for picking up an item from a queue:

var brokeredMessage = 
    _queueClient.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(DEFAULT_WAIT_TIME_IN_SECONDS));

Then we want to adjust a property so it holds a status enum like so:

brokeredMessage.Properties.Add("Status", MessageStatusEnum.MessageReceived);

Is it possible to persist a new / update property within a Brokered Message like this, does an additional method have to be called, or will any changes made to the properties be lost after it has been received?

Answer 1

Today we do not have the ability to update and existing brokeredmessage in a Queue. You can add properties to an existing brokered message but only when you are performing Abandon or DeadLetter operations on the message itself. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj673129.aspx

We do support scenarios where you want to store the progress of a workflow/group of messages through the MessageSession. Here essentially you enable Sessions for a Queue/Subscription and then rather than processing messages you call AcceptMessageSession. The SessionID property of a message will determine what session it belongs to. Each session has a state available that you can access thru GetState and SetState on MessageSession. Also transactions are supported for all these operations for you to allow for strong consistency guarantees. Following is a sample that demonstrates the use of sessions and session state: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Brokered-Messaging-Session-41c43fb4