Evaluate the message against a rule or validation condition.
Message Routing
Message Filter
Evaluate criteria and pass only messages that should continue. Non-matching messages are discarded or diverted according to the operational policy.
How can a component avoid receiving uninteresting messages?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 Filter works
A rule decides whether a message continues through the normal flow or is removed from it.
Candidate message
Message Filter
Accepted
Ignored / isolated
Apply Message Filter to separate useful messages from unwanted or invalid ones.
Forward accepted messages and explicitly handle the rejected path.
What this pattern helps you decide
Evaluate criteria and pass only messages that should continue. Non-matching messages are discarded or diverted according to the operational policy.
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 subscription filter
- APIM conditional return-response
- BizTalk filter
How the analyzers can surface it
- Filter expressions
- Discard and rejection paths
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.