In preparation for a talk I’m giving, I started looking into ways that you can create Azure Service Bus queues programatically (If you want to see some of the other posts that came out of the research for this talk, they’re here and here).

In fact, there are a few different ways, and it’s very difficult to cut through the confusion to work out which method is the new way. In this article, Microsoft recommend the method that I cover in this post.

In this post, I’ll cover creating a new message queue in code, and configuring it to auto-forward to a second queue.

The Old Way

If you go back to some of my earlier posts on Azure Service Bus, you’ll see that an object called the QueueDescription was used excessively (here and here). In the newer version of the SDK that’s no longer used, and management has been separated from the usage of the service bus. This seems to make sense, when you consider that most people using the Service Bus will not need to change the structure of it; however, there were times when having the ability to create a queue that didn’t exist would make for more resilient software.

The New Way(s)

Microsoft have replaced this with, at the time of writing, three separate alternatives. This has made the whole process very confusing - especially since some of the Microsoft documentation still talks about using QueueDescription! They, however, recommend using the Azure.Messaging.ServiceBus package.

At the time of writing, that was 7.0.1:

<PackageReference Include="Azure.Messaging.ServiceBus" Version="7.0.1" />

Creating a Queue

One of the advantages here is that you get very granular control over exactly what you’re creating; but that also means that you’re responsible for creating things such as access policies. Let’s try the following code:

var authorisationRule = new SharedAccessAuthorizationRule(
    "manage", new[] { AccessRights.Manage });

var options = new CreateQueueOptions(source);
options.AuthorizationRules.Add(authorisationRule);
            
var serviceBusAdministrationClient = new ServiceBusAdministrationClient(connectionString);
var queue = await serviceBusAdministrationClient.CreateQueueAsync(options);

In fact, this causes the following error on run:

System.ArgumentException: ‘Manage permission should also include Send and Listen’

We’re now in a world of open source, which means we can see why this doesn’t work by looking at the code. In fact, if you specify Manage privilege, it expects three permissions (that is, you must also allow Listen and Send). The working code looks like this:

var authorisationRule = new SharedAccessAuthorizationRule(
                "manage", new[] { AccessRights.Manage, AccessRights.Listen, AccessRights.Send });

var options = new CreateQueueOptions(source);
options.AuthorizationRules.Add(authorisationRule);
            
var serviceBusAdministrationClient = new ServiceBusAdministrationClient(connectionString);
var queue = await serviceBusAdministrationClient.CreateQueueAsync(options);

In fact, the reason that I started to look into queue management, was that I wanted to see if I could configure a queue with auto forwarding, without using the Azure Portal or the Service Bus Explorer.

Auto Forwarding

In fact, it’s actually quite easy. Once you start playing with the SDK, you’ll see that you can use CreateQueueOptions to specify most queue features:

var authorisationRule = new SharedAccessAuthorizationRule(
                "manage", new[] { AccessRights.Manage, AccessRights.Listen, AccessRights.Send });

var serviceBusAdministrationClient = new ServiceBusAdministrationClient(connectionString);

var optionsDest = new CreateQueueOptions(destination);
optionsDest.AuthorizationRules.Add(authorisationRule);
var queueDest = await serviceBusAdministrationClient.CreateQueueAsync(optionsDest);

var options = new CreateQueueOptions(source)
{
    ForwardTo = destination                
};
options.AuthorizationRules.Add(authorisationRule);
            
var queue = await serviceBusAdministrationClient.CreateQueueAsync(options);

Here, we’re setting up two queues (you can only forward to a queue that exists), referred to in the string variables source and destination, then we simply set the ForwardTo property of the second queue.

References

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-bus-messaging/service-bus-management-libraries

https://www.serverless360.com/blog/auto-forwarding-a-hidden-gem-of-service-bus