cloverleaf not receiving ack

[Brad Gollifer]

I have an interface that is having issues with staying connected.  The receiver says they are using biztalk and that they need to shutdown the connection after each message is received.  I believe this is causing our issues.  I see the message being sent and the most often we time out waiting for a response sometimes multiple times then receive an ack but other times we never receive and ack before we hit the retry limit and the message goes to the error db.  Has anyone experienced this situation or have a work around.  I am using the same settings that are on dozens of other interfaces and they are not having the issue.

Topic

[Jim Kosloskey]

Brad,

This probably isn’t applicable to you but our workaround was not to use BizTalk for the Comm piece. (Iguana/Chameleon is deployed).

BizTalk’s non web-based adapters and especially the HL/7 adapter are notoriously flakey. We had the same issues you are experiencing and our BizTalk using customer could not get them resolved.

We did mitigate the issue slightly by simply having a command line script that was scheduled to periodically stop start the Cloverleaf connection (that seemed to help somewhat but not completely and that one might have been where we were the server).

We also suspected their use of a firewall on their side was contributing but I personally do not think that was a major contributor.

Essentially BizTalk inherently is not a persistent connection solution (hence the Web based stuff seems to work acceptably and the TCP/IP persistent stuff does not) and what happens is the port is disconnected but not released.

Bottom line, when we need to exchange HL/7 with BizTalk we tell them to use their Iguana/Chameleon solution. It is not perfect but significantly better.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Brad Gollifer]

This is an outside company that we are dealing with that uses biztalk, elimating that probably is not going to be an option.

[Jim Kosloskey]

Brad,

Bummer (I didn’t think that would be applicable)  👿

However, you can try the stop/start periodically trick that provides some relief.

Also see if there is a VPN and/or firewall in play. If there is, try to make sure they are not ever doing a disconnect (especially because they ‘think’ there is no activity).

See posts on this forum regarding setting keep-alives and VPNs/firewalls.

You may need to get a sniffer involved to prove what they are doing.

However, as I stated, I think the problem is inherent to BizTalk and is essentially unresolvable as long as they insist on using the BizTalk adapters.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

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