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tcpip packet question

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  • July 29, 2010 at 2:23 pm #51904
    Yvonne Gaffney
    Participant

      I have a vendor that is insisting on receiving each hl7 message in its own packet.  If a message is split between packets they are dropping the second half of the message.  What is the best/quickest way to get each hl7 message bundled in its own packet?  Is this possible at all?

      Thanks  ðŸ˜€

      Yvonne Gaffney

      Integration Analyst III

      Children’s National Medical Center

      Washington DC

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      • July 29, 2010 at 3:27 pm #72206
        Charlie Bursell
        Participant

          There is no way to guarantee a message will be in only one packet.  If the message is less than a packet size it is likely that it will all be in one packet but still not guaranteed

          Have your vendor read the TCP/IP RFC

          http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc793.html

        • July 29, 2010 at 4:08 pm #72207
          Yvonne Gaffney
          Participant

            Understood and Thanks Charlie.

            Let me ask another question.  If I am processing a raw feed from one system to another – is the packaging  being done by the sending system or the Cloverleaf?

          • July 29, 2010 at 4:16 pm #72208
            John Mercogliano
            Participant

              Yvonne,

               We had this exact problem with one of our downstreams not properly coding there socket reads.  Assuming all the data would be provided in one chunk.  They had to fix there code.    

               Cloverleaf has nothing to do with the packet size.  This is done at the OS level.  Your OS and the Vendor’s OS do a handshake and who ever has the smallest buffersize wins.  Then the sending OS breaks up the message in to small enough packets that the vendors OS says it can handle.  

               The vendors OS will put the data back together as the packets are received but it’s up to the application develop to properly read from the tcp buffer to ensure that they received a complete message.  As the OS does not guarantee that all the packets will be available on any given socket read.

                The max frame size in use today is 1500 bytes.  I’ve found that most ADT fits in that unless they have lots of insurance, but results and transcriptions usually get fragmented.  We did find that our vendor had a small frame size, half of ours.  So we had them increase theres to decrease the occurences while they coded a fix.  There server admins where able to check and update that.

              Hope this helps,

              John Mercogliano
              Sentara Healthcare
              Hampton Roads, VA

            • July 29, 2010 at 5:01 pm #72209
              Charlie Bursell
              Participant

                What he said  ðŸ˜€

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