Core Publish-Subscribe (C# .NET V2)

Core Publish-Subscribe in Messaging

This example demonstrates the core NATS publish-subscribe behavior. This is the fundamental pattern that all other NATS patterns and higher-level APIs build upon. There are a few takeaways from this example:

Delivery is an at-most-once. For MQTT users, this is referred to as Quality of Service (QoS) 0.
There are two circumstances when a published message won’t be delivered to a subscriber:
- The subscriber does not have an active connection to the server (i.e. the client is temporarily offline for some reason)
- There is a network interruption where the message is ultimately dropped
Messages are published to subjects which can be one or more concrete tokens, e.g. greet.bob. Subscribers can utilize wildcards to show interest on a set of matching subjects.

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$ nbe run messaging/pub-sub/dotnet2

View the source code or learn how to run this example yourself

Code

Install NuGet packages NATS.Net, NATS.Client.Serializers.Json and Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Console.

using Microsoft.Extensions.Logging;
using NATS.Client.Core;
using NATS.Client.Serializers.Json;


using var loggerFactory = LoggerFactory.Create(builder => builder.AddConsole());
var logger = loggerFactory.CreateLogger("NATS-by-Example");

NATS_URL environment variable can be used to pass the locations of the NATS servers.

var url = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("NATS_URL") ?? "127.0.0.1:4222";

Connect to NATS server. Since connection is disposable at the end of our scope we should flush our buffers and close connection cleanly.

var opts = new NatsOpts
{
    Url = url,
    LoggerFactory = loggerFactory,
    SerializerRegistry = NatsJsonSerializerRegistry.Default,
    Name = "NATS-by-Example",
};
await using var nats = new NatsConnection(opts);

Subscribe to a subject and start waiting for messages in the background.

await using var sub = await nats.SubscribeCoreAsync<Order>("orders.>");


logger.LogInformation("Waiting for messages...");
var task = Task.Run(async () =>
{
    await foreach (var msg in sub.Msgs.ReadAllAsync())
    {
        var order = msg.Data;
        logger.LogInformation("Subscriber received {Subject}: {Order}", msg.Subject, order);
    }


    logger.LogInformation("Unsubscribed");
});

Let’s publish a few orders.

for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++)
{
    logger.LogInformation("Publishing order {Index}...", i);
    await nats.PublishAsync($"orders.new.{i}", new Order(OrderId: i));
    await Task.Delay(500);
}

We can unsubscribe now all orders are published. Unsubscribing or disposing the subscription should complete the message loop and exit the background task cleanly.

await sub.UnsubscribeAsync();
await task;

That’s it! We saw how we can subscribe to a subject and publish messages that would be seen by the subscribers based on matching subjects.

logger.LogInformation("Bye!");


public record Order(int OrderId);

Output

info: NATS.Client.Core.NatsConnection[1001]
      Try to connect NATS nats://nats:4222
info: NATS.Client.Core.Internal.NatsReadProtocolProcessor[1005]
      Received server info: ServerInfo { Id = NA5KDEZVXJXTIYMQAXRROBZL3WMLCO63YO2Z5QJOABXIFQZDN3AKTBF2, Name = NA5KDEZVXJXTIYMQAXRROBZL3WMLCO63YO2Z5QJOABXIFQZDN3AKTBF2, Version = 2.10.4, ProtocolVersion = 1, GitCommit = abc47f7, GoVersion = go1.21.3, Host = 0.0.0.0, Port = 4222, HeadersSupported = True, AuthRequired = False, TlsRequired = False, TlsVerify = False, TlsAvailable = False, MaxPayload = 1048576, JetStreamAvailable = True, ClientId = 5, ClientIp = 172.18.0.3, Nonce = , Cluster = , ClusterDynamic = False, ClientConnectUrls = , WebSocketConnectUrls = , LameDuckMode = False }
info: NATS.Client.Core.NatsConnection[1001]
      Connect succeed NATS-by-Example, NATS nats://nats:4222
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Waiting for messages...
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Publishing order 0...
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Subscriber received orders.new.0: Order { OrderId = 0 }
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Publishing order 1...
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Subscriber received orders.new.1: Order { OrderId = 1 }
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Publishing order 2...
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Subscriber received orders.new.2: Order { OrderId = 2 }
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Publishing order 3...
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Subscriber received orders.new.3: Order { OrderId = 3 }
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Publishing order 4...
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Subscriber received orders.new.4: Order { OrderId = 4 }
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Unsubscribed
info: NATS-by-Example[0]
      Bye!
info: NATS.Client.Core.NatsConnection[1001]
      Disposing connection NATS-by-Example

Recording

Note, playback is half speed to make it a bit easier to follow.