What is the correct way to make a durable subscription?

You must set the client id and the subscription name

Programmatically, you can do it like this:

topicConnection.setClientID("MyClientID");
topicSession.createDurableSubscriber(topic, "MySubscriptionName");

Or you can configure it in conf/jbossmq-state.xml

<StateManager>
     <Users>
          <User>
               <Name>john</Name>
               <Password>needle</Password>
               <Id>MyClientID</Id>
          </User>
        </Users>
     <DurableSubscriptions>
                <DurableSubscription>
                      <ClientID>MyClientID</ClientID>
                      <Name>MySubscriptionName</Name>
                       <TopicName>MyTopic</TopicName>
                </DurableSubscription>
     </DurableSubscriptions>
</StateManager>

MDBs

For MDBs you need to configure the

mdb-client-id

and

mdb-subscription-id

described in the MDB config page or the

clientID

and

subscriptionName

if you are using the new activation-config-property mechanism introduced in EJB2.1