Solace C API Developer Guide

The Solace Messaging API for C is a robust and high-performance API designed to enable C applications to interact seamlessly with the Solace event broker. The Solace C API provides comprehensive support for message exchange patterns such as point-to-point and publish-subscribe, offering advanced messaging features to handle high-throughput, low-latency environments.

To get you started, here is a brief overview of some of the key messaging concepts used in the Solace C API:

Contexts

The Solace C API uses processing contexts for organizing communication between an application and a Solace event broker. Contexts act as containers in which zero or more sessions are created and session-related events can be handled. A context encapsulates threads that drive network I/O and message delivery notification for the sessions and session components associated with that context. For the Solace C API, a single thread is used for both I/O and for notification. The life cycle of a context‑owned thread is bound to the life cycle of the context.

For more information on contexts in the Solace C API, see Creating Contexts.

Sessions

A session creates a single, client connection to an event broker for sending and receiving messages. When a context is established, one or more sessions can be created within that context.

A session provides the following primary services:

client connection
update and retrieve session properties
retrieve session statistics
add and remove subscriptions
create destinations and endpoints
publish and receive Direct messages
publish Guaranteed messages

For more information on sessions in the Solace C API, see Creating Client Sessions.

Flows

A consumer flow is an API object that allows applications to receive Guaranteed messages from an endpoint, such as a Queue. It is created by a session. To receive Guaranteed messages, a client must create a consumer flow within a session, and bind that flow to an endpoint on a Solace event broker that messages are published or attracted to.

For more information on flows in the Solace C API, see Creating Flows.