Send-only with acknowledgement protocol for web service consumer applications

The send-only with acknowledgement protocol allows your application to receive a final confirmation that the response message was delivered to the original IMS application that issued the callout request.

Restriction: Only synchronous callout applications can use the send-only with acknowledgement protocol. For IMS V12, the PTF for APAR PM91443 is required.

By default, SOAP Gateway uses the send-only protocol without acknowledgement to send callout response messages to IMS. The send-only with acknowledgement protocol provides an alternative approach that offers an extra level of confirmation that the response message was received. After the callout response message is sent to IMS, IMS sends either an ACK (positive acknowledgement) or NACK (negative acknowledgement) response to SOAP Gateway. The ACK or NACK is not sent to the external callout target application, but SOAP Gateway logs the response.

For NACK responses, SOAP Gateway logs an IOGS0082E message if the trace level is set to error or higher. For ACK responses, SOAP Gateway logs an IOGS0081I message if the trace level is set to informational or higher. If no ACK or NACK is received, SOAP Gateway logs an IOGS0083E message.

The main advantage of the send-only with ACK protocol is that you can easily identify if a callout response message was sent to IMS, whether IMS received the message, and how long it took the message to reach IMS. The main disadvantage is that the ACK or NACK reply adds an extra network communication event for each callout response message.

You can enable the send-only with acknowledgement protocol for a web service consumer application with the SOAP Gateway management utility when you create or update a correlator. Set the value for the -k property to true. The send-only with acknowledgement protocol is configured at the operation level and can be enabled or disabled without restarting the SOAP Gateway server.

Correlator files from previous versions of IMS Enterprise Suite must be migrated to correlator schema version 3.0 by using the SOAP Gateway management utility iogmgmt -migrate command to take advantage of this feature.