Delta Publish Support

To accept delta publishes, the message type and the topic must both support delta publish. When this is not the case, AMPS accepts the publish, but may not produce the expected results.

All of the basic message types provided with AMPS support delta publish with the exception of the binary message type and protobuf message types that use protobuf version 3. Composite message types support delta publish if they use the composite-local definition, as described in the section on composite message types. Types that do not support delta publish, produce the full, literal message provided with a delta publish command (rather than merging the publish into the previous state of the message).

When a topic uses the composite-local message type, parts of the composite that are provided as empty (that is, zero-length) are considered to be unchanged, and the merged message contains the existing contents of that part. This provides a convenient way to update only one part of a composite message, without having to republish data that has not changed. For example, a composite-local type contains a JSON part and a binary part can modify the JSON part without having to republish the full binary part.

AMPS queues support delta publish to an underlying topic, if that underlying topic maintains a SOW. The merged message is provided to the AMPS queue.

All other AMPS topic types that are based on a SOW and accept publish commands support delta publish. AMPS topics that do not use a SOW do not support delta publish, so publishing a delta message to those topics produces the full, literal message from the publish command rather than a merged message. Without a SOW configured for the topic, AMPS does not track the current value of a message, and therefore does not have a way to merge the publish into an existing message.