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45 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
45 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
# Subject-Based Messaging
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Fundamentally, NATS is about publishing and listening for messages. Both of these depend heavily on _Subjects_ which scope messages into streams or topics. At its simplest, a subject is just a string of characters that form a name the publisher and subscriber can use to find each other.
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The NATS server reserves a few characters as special, and the specification says that only "alpha-numeric" characters plus the "." should be used in subject names. Subjects are case-sensitive and cannot contain whitespace. For safety across clients, ASCII characters should be used, although this is subject to change in the future.
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## Subject Hierarchies
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The `.` character is used to create a subject hierarchy. For example, a world clock application might define the following to logically group related subjects:
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```markup
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time.us
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time.us.east
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time.us.east.atlanta
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time.eu.east
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time.eu.warsaw
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```
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## Wildcards
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NATS provides two _wildcards_ that can take the place of one or more elements in a dot-separated subject. Subscribers can use these wildcards to listen to multiple subjects with a single subscription but Publishers will always use a fully specified subject, without the wildcard.
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### Matching A Single Token
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The first wildcard is `*` which will match a single token. For example, if an application wanted to listen for eastern time zones, they could subscribe to `time.*.east`, which would match `time.us.east` and `time.eu.east`.
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### Matching Multiple Tokens
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The second wildcard is `>` which will match one or more tokens, and can only appear at the end of the subject. For example, `time.us.>` will match `time.us.east` and `time.us.east.atlanta`, while `time.us.*` would only match `time.us.east` since it can't match more than one token.
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### Monitoring and Wire Taps
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Subject to your security configuration, wildcards can be used for monitoring by creating something sometimes called a _wire tap_. In the simplest case you can create a subscriber for `>`. This application will receive all messages -- again, subject to security settings -- sent on your NATS cluster.
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### Mix Wildcards
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The wildcard `*` can appear multiple times in the same subject. Both types can be used as well. For example, `*.*.east.>` will receive `time.us.east.atlanta`.
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