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Setting Visibility Timeout in Amazon SQS

When a message is received in Amazon SQS, it remains on the queue until it’s deleted in order to ensure receipt. A message that was received, but not deleted, will be available in subsequent requests after a given visibility timeout to help prevent the message from being received more than once before it can be processed and deleted.

Setting the Message Visibility Timeout for a Single Message

When you have received a message, you can modify its visibility timeout by passing its receipt handle in a ChangeMessageVisibilityRequest that you pass to the AmazonSQS class' changeMessageVisibility method.

Imports

import com.amazonaws.services.sqs.AmazonSQS;
import com.amazonaws.services.sqs.AmazonSQSClientBuilder;

Code

AmazonSQS sqs = AmazonSQSClientBuilder.defaultClient();

// Get the receipt handle for the first message in the queue.
String receipt = sqs.receiveMessage(queue_url)
                    .getMessages()
                    .get(0)
                    .getReceiptHandle();

sqs.changeMessageVisibility(queue_url, receipt, timeout);

See the complete example on GitHub.

Setting the Message Visibility Timeout for Multiple Messages at Once

To set the message visibility timeout for multiple messages at once, create a list of ChangeMessageVisibilityBatchRequestEntry objects, each containing a unique ID string and a receipt handle. Then, pass the list to the Amazon SQS client class' changeMessageVisibilityBatch method.

Imports

import com.amazonaws.services.sqs.AmazonSQS;
import com.amazonaws.services.sqs.AmazonSQSClientBuilder;
import com.amazonaws.services.sqs.model.ChangeMessageVisibilityBatchRequestEntry;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

Code

AmazonSQS sqs = AmazonSQSClientBuilder.defaultClient();

List<ChangeMessageVisibilityBatchRequestEntry> entries =
    new ArrayList<ChangeMessageVisibilityBatchRequestEntry>();

entries.add(new ChangeMessageVisibilityBatchRequestEntry(
            "unique_id_msg1",
            sqs.receiveMessage(queue_url)
               .getMessages()
               .get(0)
               .getReceiptHandle())
        .withVisibilityTimeout(timeout));

entries.add(new ChangeMessageVisibilityBatchRequestEntry(
            "unique_id_msg2",
            sqs.receiveMessage(queue_url)
               .getMessages()
               .get(0)
               .getReceiptHandle())
        .withVisibilityTimeout(timeout + 200));

sqs.changeMessageVisibilityBatch(queue_url, entries);

See the complete example on GitHub.

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