DefaultMessageListenerContainer not receiving messages

Question

I have a DefaultMessageListenerContainer configured as follows:

DefaultMessageListenerContainer container = new DefaultMessageListenerContainer();
container.setConcurrentConsumers(4);
container.setConnectionFactory(connectionFactory);
container.setDestinationName(String.format("Consumer.%s.VirtualTopic.%s", group, topic));
container.setSessionAcknowledgeMode(Session.CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE);
container.setSessionTransacted(true);
container.setMessageListener(new DelegatingMessageListener(listener, messageMapper, event));

container.start();

The message container never receives messages, and my message listener is never invoked. Leaving all else the same, if I just switch DefaultMessageListenerContainer to SimpleMessageListenerContainer, it works - but SimpleMessageListenerContainer doesn't recover after a connection loss

There are no errors in the logs, and hardly any relevant messages. Does anyone have any reasons for why this may be happening?

Thermobarometer

Doesn't make any sense to me; try turning on TRACE level logging. – Cuthburt

@GaryRussell I have enabled trace. ActiveMQ itself doesn't even seem to log anything, indicating that the subscription is never actually happening (which I suspected). Looking into the source for Spring, I see that SimpleMessageListenerContainer has an overridden doStart method that actually creates the listeners. I don't see that corresponding code in DefaultMessageListenerContainer, which is interesting. Maybe I'm missing something. – Thermobarometer

Yes, of course; you need to call afterPropertiesSet(). – Cuthburt

Answer 1

When constructing the container in Java (outside a Spring application context), you need to invoke afterPropertiesSet() before start().

The context does that automatically for Spring beans.

Cuthburt

Thank you! This worked perfectly. Now I feel stupid. I would have just registered everything through the context, but I have this code in a shared library that each service depends on, and the services subscribe to an abstraction above the Spring JMS layer (so they don't know anything about the existence of JMS - they just send and react to events from somewhere). – Thermobarometer