Work with specific protocols and standards > AS4 > AS4 tasks > Modify an AS4 trading delivery

Modify an AS4 trading delivery

When you add a pickup or delivery, the wizard prompts you to provide a basic set of parameters. After you create the pickup or delivery you can open the maintenance page to view and manage a comprehensive set of parameters. Some of these parameters were automatically set when you added the object, and can only be modified after you add the object.

Procedure

In the Activator user interface, from the Partners menu select Manage partners.
From the list of partners, click the name of a partner to display the Summary page for that partner.
Click Partner delivery in the navigation graphic to open the Partner deliveries page.
From the list of available deliveries, click the name of an AS4 delivery to open the maintenance page for the delivery.
View and modify fields as required. The fields are described in the following section.
If you make any changes, click Save Changes.

AS4 partner delivery exchange maintenance fields

HTTP settings tab

URL – URL to use for the connection to the trading partner's server.

Message Partition Channel (MPC) – The Message Partition Channel(MPC) is a required attribute of any AS4 message exchange. MPCs enable the partitioning the flow of messages from a sending participant a receiving participant, into several flows that can be controlled separately and consumed differently. They also allow for merging flows from several sending participants, into a unique flow that will be treated as such by a receiver.
This value is used both for a final push configuration option and for secondary pull authorization checks.
In this field, you can specify the MPC to use for AS4 message deliveries to this partner.
If you do not specify an MPC in this field, the default-implicit (empty) MPC is automatically selected.
Clients must use SSL to connect to this server – Select this option to have Secure Sockets Layer protocol in use during connections. The server presents a certificate for verification. To do this, a certificate assigned to a partner must be designated as the SSL certificate. The server must support SSL. If this option is not selected, connections are not encrypted.
- Enable host name verification – Select this additional SSL option if you want Activator to compare the name of the SSL server to the name in the server’s certificate, to ensure that they are the same.
This server requires a user name and password – If necessary for your connection, select this option, and then type a user name and password to connect to the server.

This server requires a user name and password – If selected, enter a user name and password to connect to the server.

Advanced tab

Maximum concurrent connections – The number of total open connections Activator server can make to a partner.
Retries – This is the number of times Activator tries to connect to the partner’s transport if the initial attempt to connect and send the message failed. The following are common reasons for triggering retries:
- The connection attempt failed immediately for a specific reason such as host not found.
- The host was found, but the connection process took longer than the connect timeout interval specified on the Advanced tab.
- The connection was successful, but the partner’s HTTP server took longer than the response timeout interval to return a 200 OK response indicating the message was successfully received. A 200 OK response is a transport response, separate from a message protocol response such as an AS2 receipt.
Note: In the last case above, the 200 OK response also includes the receipt if synchronous receipts were requested. Otherwise, it will be a simple 200 OK response with no payload. And if an asynchronous receipt was requested, the partner will connect later to send it.
Retries occur according to an algorithm that starts at 5 minutes. The interval between retries increases with each subsequent retry in this pattern: 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes. The interval plateaus at 60 minutes. This means if the retry value is greater than 5, the fifth and each subsequent retry occurs at 60 minute intervals.
For example, if retries is 3, the system will try connecting again in 5 minutes if the initial connection attempt fails. If this retry attempt also fails, the system attempts a second retry in 10 minutes. The third retry attempt is made 15 minutes later. If the third retry attempt fails, the message is given a failed status. So after four attempts (the first attempt plus 3 retries), the message fails. You can search for and manually resubmit failed messages in Message Tracker.
Retries do not occur precisely at these intervals because each connection attempt takes some seconds, which varies by computer. So retries actually occur after the connection attempt time plus the interval.
This control applies only to retrying to send messages, not receiving. It applies only to retrying to send related to transport issues. It does not apply to successfully sent messages for which receipts have not been received as expected. Another control, resends, determines how many times the system will resend a message when a receipt is not received from the partner. For information about resends, see reliable messaging in the collaboration settings chapter.
Response timeout (seconds) – How long, in seconds, that Activator waits for the delivery exchange to respond to a request before terminating the connection.
Enable HTTP chunking – If you are sending files larger than 2 gigabytes, select this option to turn on chunking. A chunked message is a large message broken into smaller pieces for sending to a partner over the Internet or to back-end integration.
Although primarily for handling large messages, chunking can be enabled for small messages, too. However, if your partners use a trading engine other than Activator or use an external or staged HTTP server, they may be unable to accept messages larger than 2 gigabytes, even if the messages are chunked.
Also, in rare cases a partner’s HTTP server may be unable to handle chunked messages, regardless of message size. You should perform tests to determine whether a partner’s server can handle chunked messages. If not, the partner must use Activator with the embedded server to receive large chunked messages successfully.
If you enable chunking because of large messages, you also probably need to request that receipts be sent over an asynchronous connection. See the chapter on collaboration settings for details.
Attempt restarts – Select this option to turn on checkpoint-restart. A checkpoint is information saved to disk that is a recovery point in the event of a transport failure. The restart program uses the last saved checkpoint and starts again, ensuring no loss of data.
The checkpoint files are saved on the server under the <install directory>/common/data/http/restartable. Thus, if a transfer is interrupted and the load balancer directs the restart request to a different node, the restart file will be accessible to the new node even though it did not process the original request.
To reduce unnecessary overhead when processing small files, checkpoint files are only created for messages that are at least 100 KB in size. Also, if a restart is attempted for a message whose checkpoint file on the server is more than four hours old, the checkpoint file will be discarded and the entire message will be retransmitted.
The restart logic is used only during transport retries, such as might occur when a transfer is interrupted due to network problems. If you resubmit a message in Message Tracker, no attempt is made to perform a checkpoint-restart.
This feature only works if your partner uses Activator and its embedded HTTP server. Do not select this option if a partner uses an external or staged HTTP server or uses a trading engine other than Activator.
Enable use of 102-processing – This option is available to ensure that the connection between the client and server does not become idle and fail while message processing is in progress. For example, this makes sure the connection remains active when the client is sending a multi-gigabyte message. Or, to prevent a firewall from disconnecting an idle connection before the server receives the entire message and returns a 200 OK response. Most often this setting is useful when the client requests a synchronous receipt, but also could be recommended in some cases for an asynchronous receipt.
Selecting this check box directs Activator to add the following to the header of an outbound message: Expect: 102-processing. This is an HTTP response code that indicates processing is in progress. If the receiving server supports 102 responses, the header triggers the server to send 102 responses to the client repeatedly until the server has completely processed the inbound message.
Before selecting this option, make sure the server supports 102 responses. If you turn on 102 processing and the server does not support it, the server will return a 417 message (the server could not meet the expectation given in the Expect header) and the connection may fail. If the receiving partner uses the embedded HTTP server in Activator 5.5.1 or later, 102 responses are supported. This also is supported if your partner uses Jetty 6 or later.
Back up the files that go through this transport – Indicates whether the system backs up copies of the messages it retrieves from integration or receives from partners. Backing up files is required for the system to perform fail-over operations such as attempting to send messages again (retries) in case of a transport connection failure. Without backups, a message in process cannot be recovered if the server or a processing node stops or restarts. Backups are needed to resubmit messages to back-end applications or resend messages to partners. Backup files are stored in \<install directory>\common\data\backup, unless you specify otherwise.
Post-processing script – The full path to an executable file that contains post-processing commands. This field is available for community integration delivery exchanges and partner trading delivery exchanges.