MQTT - Publishing and Subscribing

MQTT - Publishing and Subscribing

You can publish to your MQTT topics by coding a script that will run from an Analysis. When the analysis runs, your script can publish a topic that can be received by any device that has subscribed to that specific topic. There are different ways to start an analysis; it may be by timer, an Action, or called by another analysis. The figure below shows the data flow from the analysis to the MQTT network.

This section describes how to Publish and Subscribe to a topic in the MQTT Broker. We are assuming that you already know how to connect to MQTT; if you do not, please read our article MQTT on how this is done.
There is a limit on the number of connections, publications, and subscriptions you can make, enforced based on your account plan. For more information, read about Rate Limits (Hard Limits).

Publishing to TagoIO

You can create an Action and attach it to any specific topic or wildcard topics, and take actions from there.

You can send the payload directly to your bucket, to trigger an Analysis, or through SMS or E-mail.

If you are sending a payload in a JSON format, the TagoIO backend will add a new field called metadata with a child field called topic. However, if you are sending a raw payload, you must transform your format into the TagoIO JSON format with a variable called payload and your raw data as value. This will also add a metadata with a topic name (identically to what would happen with a payload already in a JSON format).

QoS and Retained Message Support 

The Quality of Service (QoS) level is an agreement between the sender of a message and the receiver of a message. It defines the guarantee of delivery for a specific message. TagoIO officially supports QoS 0 and 1.

TagoIO does not support the native Retain feature found in standard MQTT protocol implementations; however, we offer a workaround to achieve similar functionality. Read more here: MQTT Retain on TagoIO Broker.

How to Debug MQTT with TagoIO

You can see all your connections directly on the Live Inspector, and you are able to check any connection, payload, QOS, Last Will messages, and more.
The messages are triggered with the following actions.

  • a client connects to the broker
  • a client disconnects from the broker
  • a client subscribes to any topic
  • a client unsubscribes from any topic
  • a client publishes to any topic

Subscribing - Single level

The single level is represented by the + sign, which is then added to the topic.

Example:
If the client subscribes to the topic home/+/temperature, the following topics will match:

  • home/kitchen/temperature
  • home/office/temperature
  • home/livingroom/temperature

This means that if any client publishes data to these topics above, the subscribed client will receive it.

The following topics WILL NOT match:

  • home/kitchen
  • home/kitchen/humidity
  • home/office/ac/temperature

Subscribing - Multi level

The multi level is represented by the # sign. By adding a # sign to the topic, the client will subscribe to all the following levels of that topic.

Example:
If the client subscribes to the topic home/#, the following topics will match:

  • home/kitchen
  • home/kitchen/temperature
  • home/office/ac/temperature
  • home/upstairs/bedroom/ac/temperature

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