Are PeopleSoft Integration Broker asynchronous messages fired serially on the receiving end?

Question

I have a strange problem on a PeopleSoft application. It appears that integration broker messages are being processed out of order. There is another possibility, and that is that the commit is being fired asynchronously, allowing the transactions to complete out of order.

There are many inserts of detail records, followed by a trailer record which performs an update on the rows just inserted. Some of the rows are not receiving the update. This problem is sporadic, about once every 6 months, but it causes statistically significant financial reporting errors.

I am hoping that someone has had enough dealings with the internals of PeopleTools to know what it is up to, so that perhaps I can find a work around to the problem.

Answer 1

Any luck with Global Support?

Answer 2

You don't mentioned whether you've set this or not, but you have a choice with Integration Broker. All messages flow through message channels, and a channel can either be ordered or unordered. If a channel is ordered then - if a message errors - all subsequent messages queue up behind it and will not be processed until it succeeds.

Whether a channel is ordered or not depends upon the checkbox on the message channel properties in Application Designer. From memory channels are ordered by default, but you can uncheck the box to increase throughput.

Hope this helps.

PS. As of Tools 8.49 the setup changed slightly, Channels became Queues, Messages Service Operations etc.

Answer 3

I heard from GSC. We had two domains on the sending end as well as two domains on the receiving end. All were active. According to them, it is possible when you have multiple domains for each of the servers to pick up some of the messages in the group, and therefore, process them asynchronously, rather than truly serially.

We are going to reduce the active servers to one, and see it it happens again, but it is so sporadic that we may never know for sure.

Answer 4

There are few changes happened in PSFT 9 IB so please let me know the version of your apps. Async services can work with Sync now. Message channel properties are need to set properly. Similar kind of problem, I found on www.itwisesolutions.com/PsftTraining.html website but that was more related to implementing itself.

thanks