Java JMS - Send message to Dead Letter Queue explicitly

Question

Is there a way to explicitly tell the broker to send a message to the queue's assigned dead letter queue?

I know we can configure a queue to automatically send messages to the DLQ after a certain number of re-delivery attempts. That makes perfect sense for transient errors such as database issues,.network issues, etc. However in the case of a business rule error, it doesn't make sense to have that message attempt redelivery X number of times over X number of minutes before being sent to the dead letter queue when we know it's a business rule violate / malformed message, etc.

I was hoping there was a way that when we catch a business rule violation we can immediately send it to that queues dead letter queue. I know I could explicitly write the code to send it to that dead letter queue but we will have many (dozens) of configurable queues and their associated dead letter queues will be configured by our middleware team. I don't want to explicitly code the dead letter queue queue names or even configure them in my own properties. I'm hoping there is a simple way to tell the broker to immediately send the message to the dead letter queue and not attempt redelivery.

It seems like it should be something like message.deadLetter() . I feel like I must be missing something simple but I don't see any mechanism like that on the consumer, session or message.

Answer 1

There is no accommodation for the feature you're describing in the JMS specification. The JMS spec incorporates redelivery via things like the JMSRedelivered header and JMSXDeliveryCount property. However, it actually makes no mention of "dead-letter" destinations.

That said, such a feature might be provided by a particular JMS broker, but since you don't mention what JMS broker implementation you're using it's impossible to say whether your chosen broker implements such a feature. In any case, it would be configured and/or invoked via an implementation-specific mechanism that would be, by definition, non-portable between brokers and not available from the JMS API.