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
- In the administrative console, click .
- Select the Enable service at server startup check
box.
- 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.
- 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.
- Save your changes to the master configuration.
- Repeat the previous steps for each server that you plan to use.
- 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.