Transmission Acknowledgment Task

The transmission acknowledgment task automates reporting the status of financial batches (ICLs) between institutions. It initiates reporting status without user interaction, saves processing costs, and conforms to industry standards. It supports XML technology, using common programming tools to easily transform data to any supported format. The following sections provide more details about transmission acknowledgment.

Financial information arrives in the form of electronic deposit files that are transmitted by financial institutions. An electronic deposit file is a transmission that contains either batches or ICLs. It might also have multiple batches or ICLs. Multiple segments or bundles can make up each ICL. Each segment might contain multiple transactions. The entire electronic deposit file represents a batch (ICL) in Payment Feature Services. The quality of the financial information is checked, processing options are determined, the information is saved in a database and managed as it makes its way through the financial accounting system.

The transmission acknowledgment task sends reports to the financial institution that sent the electronic transmission. As the transmission is processed, transmission acknowledgment reports may be sent as the transmission reaches various stages of processing and as errors are corrected. The reports acknowledge to the financial institution that its electronic transmission has been received and is being processed.

Gateway Server and Transaction Server load the incoming electronic transmission and save the financial information in a database. As the batches (ICLs) are loaded in the database, significant events occur and are detected by Transaction Server. These events indicate the progress made by the transmission as it is processed.

The Transaction Server can use its Messaging API message protocol to notify external applications when events pertaining to the transmission occur. Transaction Server event handlers are used to create the acknowledgment messages. The PresentmentGroupEventHandler and PresentmentStatesEventHandler can be configured to send Messaging API messages as transmissions and batches (ICLs) are loaded into the system, as well as when their status is modified. Each transmission has a unique numeric ID, which is included in the Messaging API message. The messages can inform the sender of electronic transmission processing errors. For more information about event handlers and the Messaging API, see Events and communication with external applications.

The transmission acknowledgment task is configured to run in Services Framework and is managed by the general task management of the Control Center. Services Framework provides a consistent interface for its configured tasks. It uses a plug-in architecture to enable the web-based user interface to monitor and interact with the service engine of a task. The user interface for this task allows the user to monitor the transmission acknowledgment tasks, check them for errors, and reissue them as needed.

When Services Framework receives a transmission acknowledgment message from Transaction Server on its message queue, it searches its tasks for one that matches the receiving point ID in the message. The transmission acknowledgment task must be configured to run before it is called. Transmission acknowledgment uses the unique transmission ID to retrieve information about the batches (ICLs) from the database and construct a normalized transmission acknowledgment XML file. The XML file, some routing information, and a signal file are placed in an output directory to indicate that the acknowledgment files are ready to be sent.

The transmission acknowledgment task can be configured to generate acknowledgments on transmission status changes, batch(ICL) status changes, or both. There can be separate task configurations to handle transmission status changes and batch (ICL) status changes. These task configurations can be scheduled to run. In this case, when Transaction Server events occur because of transmission or batch (ICL) status changes, the task adds a record to a database table. When the same task configuration is called as a Services Framework scheduled task, multiple acknowledgments are generated for all of the transmission records, batch (ICL) records, or both, that are in the database table.

Note: The transmission acknowledgment task can use the XML transformation language, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT), to convert the normalized transmission acknowledgment XML file to another format. Using this method, transmission acknowledgment files are automatically delivered in any format using a Gateway supported delivery channel.

By default, transmission acknowledgment uses Gateway Server to send the acknowledgments, which places the files in the Gateway outgoing directory. When the transmission acknowledgment file set appears in its directory, Gateway Server uses the specifications from the routing information file to deliver the acknowledgment.