Receive or create the message at the integration boundary.
Message Construction
Message Expiration
Attach a time-to-live or expiry timestamp so stale work is removed or diverted instead of producing outdated side effects.
How can a sender indicate when a message should be considered stale and thus shouldn’t be processed?Adapted from Enterprise Integration Patterns under CC BY 3.0. The visualization and explanatory content on this page are original GateSift material.
Original GateSift visualization
How Message Expiration works
The pattern introduces a clear integration responsibility between message production and consumption.
Producer
Message Expiration
Consumer
Apply Message Expiration to solve the recurring design problem.
Continue the message flow with clearer responsibilities and lower coupling.
What this pattern helps you decide
Attach a time-to-live or expiry timestamp so stale work is removed or diverted instead of producing outdated side effects.
What happens when processing fails or the same message is delivered twice?
Where does state, correlation or routing configuration live?
How will operators trace the message and understand the decision path?
Where you may see it
- Service Bus TimeToLive
- Event Grid event TTL
- APIM cache or token expiry
How the analyzers can surface it
- TTL and timeout settings
- Stale-message handling
Pattern detection is contextual. GateSift should present these as architectural signals, not claim a pattern is implemented solely because one policy statement or adapter exists.
Source, licence and attribution
The pattern name and selected problem statement are adapted from Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf under CC BY 3.0. GateSift summaries, Azure mappings, analyzer guidance and diagrams are original. No endorsement by the original authors is implied.