Simple RabbitMQ client wrapper

Question

After reading this question, I've realized that I can do a lot to improve the quality of my question, so I've edited this question quite a bit.

I've been teaching myself F# in my spare time off and on for the last 6 months. I've finally started getting comfortable enough with the language to feel that a lot of my code could be much better. The problem is, I don't know what changes to make.

Here's what I'm interested in:

• I'm using higher order functions to return functions for interacting with a specific message queue. Is this a good design. Would another F# developer feel comfortable with this?
• Does this fit the idiomatic style of F#?
• If you know RabbitMQ, are there any bugs which I may be creating here.

Here's the context of the little block of code:

I'm doing a lot of experiments with messaging systems and I've been using RabbitMQ as a messaging framework. There's a .Net library for RabbitMQ but it's written in and for C#. I can use it in F# but it feels clunky. I wanted a small wrapper around the RabbitMQ library which which convert it into a more functional interface. Also, this will hopefully make it very easy to use RabbitMQ in an F# program.

My wrapper handles the following for RabbitMQ:

1. Connect to a RabbitMQ server
2. Create a function which will let you read one message from a queue
3. Create a function which will write a message to a queue

4. For both 2 and 3, if the queue doesn't exist, the queue will be created (that's the declareQueue)

   module Client =
    let connectToRabbitMqServerAt address = 
    let factory = new ConnectionFactory(HostName = address)
    factory.CreateConnection()
    let openChannelOn (connection:IConnection) = connection.CreateModel()
    let private declareQueue (channel:IModel) queueName = 
    channel.QueueDeclare( queueName, false, false, false, null )
    let private publishToQueue (channel:IModel) queueName (message:string) =
    let body = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message)
    channel.BasicPublish("", queueName, null, body)
    let createQueueReader channel queue = 
    declareQueue channel queue |> ignore
    fun () -> 
    let ea = channel.BasicGet(queue, true)
    if ea <> null then
    let body = ea.Body
    let message = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(body)
    Some message
    else
    None
    let createQueueWriter channel queue =
    declareQueue channel queue |> ignore
    publishToQueue channel queue
   

An example use case would be:

// open a connection to a RabbitMQ broker
let connection = connectToRabbitMqServerAt "localhost"
let myChannel = openChannelOn connection
// Connect to a queue for writing
let writeToHelloQueue = createQueueWriter myChannel "hello"
// write the message "Hello, World" to the queue "hello"
"Hello, World" |> writeToHelloQueue

Answer 1

Overall, this code looks very good. Just two nitpicks here:

1. Give your function definitions lines to themselves:

let openChannelOn (connection:IConnection) = connection.CreateModel()

2. Use match statements unless you are checking a boolean value directly:

if ea <> null then
 let body = ea.Body
 let message = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(body)
 Some message
else
 None

Becomes:

match ea with
| null -> None
| _ ->
 let body = ea.Body
 let message = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(body)
 Some message