How do I stop my System.Messaging.MessageQueue from wrapping my strings in XML?

Question

I need to communicate with a legacy application from my C# app via the Windows Message Queue.

The legacy application expects plain string messages in a particular private queue, but I can't seem to stop the System.Messaging.MessageQueue from wrapping my message in XML!

The code I'm testing is very simple:

MessageQueue myQueue = new MessageQueue(@".\Private$\tolegacy");
Message msg = new Message("My Test String");
myQueue.Send(msg);

The trouble is that the message is being XML serialized and appears in the queue as:

<?xml version="1.0"?><string>My Test String</string>

I can't modify the behaviour of the legacy application, so I need to stop the System.Messaging.MessageQueue from formatting my message as XML.

Can anyone help?

Unsound

Answer 1

You can create your own formatter (it is a class that implements IMessageFormatter and assign it to the Formatter property of the Message

Here is a link to MSDN to the Message.Formatter property.

I have not tried this but you should be able to write your message using the BodyStream, I believe this will bypass the formatter.

Befuddle

Writing directly to the BodyStream worked, thanks. It looked like the easiest change so I tried it first :) – Unsound

I've written several myself and they work really well. The only thing you have to worry about is the sender and reciever understanding the body type. – Oaxaca

We are having similar issue. We can read/write queue and get message back fine. But when vendor reads queue, he sees the extra "stuff" wrapped around our message. How can we just write a simple string with no wrapping at all? Even BinaryFormatter added a bunch of bytes at the beginning of the string. – Final

Answer was - remove all formatters - MemoryStream myStream = new MemoryStream(System.Text.encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(myString); msg.BodyStream = myStream; Q.Send(msg); – Final

To correct a few bugs in @NealWalters's above comment, it's using System.Text; then var memStream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(myString)); then var msg = new Message { BodyStream = memStream }; then Q.Send(msg); – Archuleta

Answer 2

Using the ActiveXMessageFormatter will give you the desired result. We had the same issue with just wanting to pass a string to a queue and have the listener process read in the body as a string. The ActiveXMessageFormatter is used for serializing/deserializing primitive data types and will not put an XML wrapper on your input as is the case with the default XmlMessageFormatter.

mq.Formatter = new ActiveXMessageFormatter();

Here is another link describing the 3 different formatters as well.

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