Order of Messages

Messages from the broker are published to the clientOutboundChannel, from where they are written to WebSocket sessions. As the channel is backed by a ThreadPoolExecutor, messages are processed in different threads, and the resulting sequence received by the client may not match the exact order of publication.

To enable ordered publishing, set the setPreservePublishOrder flag as follows:

@Configuration
@EnableWebSocketMessageBroker
public class MyConfig implements WebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer {

	@Override
	protected void configureMessageBroker(MessageBrokerRegistry registry) {
		// ...
		registry.setPreservePublishOrder(true);
	}

}

The following example shows the XML configuration equivalent of the preceding example:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
	xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xmlns:websocket="http://www.springframework.org/schema/websocket"
	xsi:schemaLocation="
		http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
		https://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
		http://www.springframework.org/schema/websocket
		https://www.springframework.org/schema/websocket/spring-websocket.xsd">

	<websocket:message-broker preserve-publish-order="true">
		<!-- ... -->
	</websocket:message-broker>

</beans>

When the flag is set, messages within the same client session are published to the clientOutboundChannel one at a time, so that the order of publication is guaranteed. Note that this incurs a small performance overhead, so you should enable it only if it is required.

The same also applies to messages from the client, which are sent to the clientInboundChannel, from where they are handled according to their destination prefix. As the channel is backed by a ThreadPoolExecutor, messages are processed in different threads, and the resulting sequence of handling may not match the exact order in which they were received.

To enable ordered publishing, set the setPreserveReceiveOrder flag as follows:

@Configuration
@EnableWebSocketMessageBroker
public class MyConfig implements WebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer {

	@Override
	public void registerStompEndpoints(StompEndpointRegistry registry) {
		registry.setPreserveReceiveOrder(true);
	}
}