Configuring a server to use business activity support

Business activity support provides compensation for activities such as sending an email, which can be difficult or impossible to roll back atomically. With this compensation, applications on disparate systems can coordinate activities that are more loosely coupled than atomic transactions. To use the business activity support, you must first enable it on each server that you plan to use.

About this task

If an application component uses business activity support, you must enable the support on each server that runs the application.

Procedure

  1. In the administrative console, click Servers > Server Types > WebSphere application servers > server_name > [Container Settings] Container Services > Compensation Service.
  2. Select the Enable service at server startup check box.
  3. To change the directory in which compensation logs are written, type the full path name of the directory in the Recovery log directory field.
    For a high availability (HA) environment, you must change the compensation log directory so that each server in the cluster has a unique compensation log directory.

    When you use WebSphere® Application Server without high availability support, you do not need to set the recovery log configuration for persistent services such as the compensation service. The application server assumes a default location in the appropriate profile directory. When high availability support is enabled, this default location might not be visible from all servers in the cluster (for example, if the servers are in different profiles or physical nodes.) Because of this behavior, configure the recovery log directory for each server in the cluster before enabling high availability. Each server in the cluster must have a unique compensation and transaction log directory, so that multiple servers do not attempt to access the same log file. Also, each server in the cluster must be able to access the transaction and compensation log directories of the other servers in the cluster.

  4. If required, modify the compensation handler retry interval and limit.
    These values control the frequency with which the compensation handler compensate and close methods are retried, when either throw a RetryCompensationHandlerException exception, and the number of times that these methods are retried.
  5. Save your changes to the master configuration.
  6. Repeat the previous steps for each server that you plan to use.
  7. Restart all the servers for the changes to take effect.

Results

The business activity support is enabled for the application server. Verify a successful enablement by checking for the message, CWSCP0005I: The Compensation service started successfully. in the SystemOut.log file for the relevant server.
Note: This topic references one or more of the application server log files. As a recommended alternative, you can configure the server to use the High Performance Extensible Logging (HPEL) log and trace infrastructure instead of using SystemOut.log , SystemErr.log, trace.log, and activity.log files on distributed and IBM® i systems. You can also use HPEL in conjunction with your native z/OS® logging facilities. If you are using HPEL, you can access all of your log and trace information using the LogViewer command-line tool from your server profile bin directory. See the information about using HPEL to troubleshoot applications for more information on using HPEL.

What to do next

Deploy the business-activity-enabled application to the server.
Note: Applications can exploit the business activity support only if you deploy them to a WebSphere Application Server at Version 6.1 or later. Applications cannot use the business activity support if you deploy them to a cluster that includes WebSphere Application ServerVersion 6.0.x servers.