Message Queues

jhmase: The page contains a lot of information that should not be in an overview page.

Message queues are the place holders of Application Messages. IFS Connect Message Queues are used for different purposes, such as:

• Storage of messages when they are processed asynchronously.
• Storage of background jobs.
• Storage of notification, warning and error messages.

Some default queues are created at the initialization process and are used by the IFS Connect Framework for the above purposes while any new queue can be created by using the Message Queue feature in IFS Administration Client.

Those default message queues are

1. Default Batch Queue (BATCH1):
   The default batch queue is used to keep the background jobs that will be processed by the Batch Server.
2. Print Agent Batch Queue (BATCH2):
   This queue is specially assigned for the Print Agent background job.
3. Default Inbound Queue (IN1):
   Any inbound asynchronous message will be placed in this queue before processing.
4. Default Outbound Queue (OUT1):
   All outbound asynchronous application messages will be placed here before being processed by the batch server.
5. Notification Queue (NOTIFICATIONS):
   Notification messages are being kept here. For example any finished Connectivity Event messages will be kept here.
6. Error Queue (ERROR):
   Whenever an error occurred while processing an application message it will be posted in the error queue.
7. Trashcan Queue (TRASHCAN):
   All messages that are to be deleted by the batch process "Cleanup of Trashcan Queue' will be kept here. 

Note: Any message that should be deleted permanently should be moved to the Trashcan Queue so that batch server can identify and remove it.

Understand an Application Message

Application message is the data structure used in IFS Connect Framework. Any application message consists of three major parts:

• Header
• Address List
• Message Bodies

Header

General information that is relevant to a particular application message is defined in the header part of the application message. The header part is used to specify the application message itself.

Address List

The Address list of an application message describes the associated destination addresses and response addresses.
The difference between these two types are, contents of a message are delivered to destination addresses and response addresses are used to send asynchronous responses whether the message has been successfully processed or not. Both of these address types share the same format.

An entry in the Address list describes:

• the address data to be used when processing
• transport connector to be used ( BizApi, File connector, Mail connector etc)
• envelop, encoding and transformers
• state whether the message was processed correctly, any error description, max retires and retry count on failures
• sender, sent date and receiver name
• expiry date for processing

Message Bodies

An application message can contain initial request, function result and reply bodies. Inbound messages do not contain function result. Initial request body consists of  XML data to be used in processing the message. Function result consist the result of the initial request after processed by the BizAPI. A reply body consists the data sent in a reply message. This may be XML, PDF, Text or Binary data. The body is always stored in original format.