Dead-Lettering a Message on a Service Bus Session Enabled Queue

Question

I have a Logic App workflow that handles my session enabled queue messages. It processes the first message and completes the session on success. If a failure occurs processing the first message it is dead-lettered. After the dead-lettering does the session also have to be completed or is that handled automatically in the dead-lettering action?

Answer 1

Hi @Warren Kinley ,

Dead-lettering a message does not automatically complete the session; rather, it's up to your application to handle that.

When you dead-letter a message, you use the DeadLetterMessageAsync method. This queues the message for inspection later.

After dead-lettering the message, you need to explicitly complete the session. This step is crucial because, if the session is not completed, it may lead to further issues like session lock timeout or unprocessed messages sitting in the session indefinitely.

You can access the dead-letter queue to inspect the dead-lettered messages later on and make decisions based on the errors encountered.

References:

• Overview of Service Bus dead-letter queues
• How to access the dead-letter queue
• DeadLetterMessageAsync Method

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

When you dead-letter a message in a session-enabled queue, the session does not need to be completed separately. The dead-lettering action automatically handles the completion of the message within the session. This means that once you call the dead-letter operation on a message, it is effectively removed from the session, and you do not have to manually complete the session afterward.

This behavior ensures that the session state is managed correctly without requiring additional steps from the user after a message has been dead-lettered.

---

References:

• Overview of Service Bus dead-letter queues
• Settling receive operations