Messages and message types

A Message is the package of information sent from a producer to a receiver through the Message Consumer. The following table describes the parts of a message.

Table 7. Message parts
Part	Definition
Header field	A predefined set of names and data
Property	Message property pairs set by the message producer
Message body	Message content formatted according to the message type

SonicMQ provides several standard JMS message types, plus the XMLMessage and MultipartMessage types. The following table lists the SonicMQ message types and content of each.

Table 8. Message types
SonicMQ message type	Message body
HeaderMessage	No body—a header-only message that handles bodyless JMS messages
TextMessage	A standard Java string
MapMessage	A set of name/value pairs where values are Java primitives
StreamMessage	A stream of Java primitives
BytesMessage	A stream of uninterpreted bytes
MultiPartMessage	Zero or more parts—each part is either arbitrary (character or binary) data or a Sonic message
XMLMessage	XML tagged text. A SonicMQ extension of the TextMessage