Associating fan-out and fan-in aggregation flows

Associate the fan-out message flow processing with its corresponding fan-in message flow processing by setting the Aggregate Name property of the AggregateControl and AggregateReply nodes in your aggregation flow to the same value.

Before you begin

If you did not configure this property when you created your fan-in and fan-out flows, you must complete this task.

You must complete the following tasks.

About this task

The Aggregate Name must be contextually unique within an integration node. You can have only one AggregateControl node and one AggregateReply node with a particular Aggregate Name, although you can have more than one AggregateControl node with the same Aggregate Name, see Using multiple AggregateControl nodes. Do not deploy a fan-in flow to multiple integration servers on the same integration node; results are unpredictable.

You can either create the fan-out and fan-in flows in the same message flow, or in two different message flows. In either case, the two parts of the aggregation are associated when you set the Aggregate Name property.

How you configure your aggregation flow depends on a number of factors:

  • The design of your message flow.
  • The hardware on which the integration node is running.
  • The timeout values that you choose, see Setting timeout values for aggregation.
  • How you expect to maintain the message flows.

You can include the fan-out and fan-in flow within the same message flow. However, you might prefer to create two separate flows. The advantages of creating separate fan-out and fan-in flows are:

  • You can modify the two flows independently.
  • You can start and stop the two flows independently.
  • You can deploy the two flows to separate integration servers to take advantage of multiprocessor systems, or to provide data separation for security or integrity purposes.
  • You can allocate different numbers of additional threads to the two flows to maintain a suitable processing ratio.

To associate the fan-out flow with the fan-in flow, complete the following steps.

Procedure

  1. Switch to the Integration Development perspective.
  2. Open the message flow that contains your fan-out flow.
  3. Select the AggregateControl node to open the Properties view.
    The node properties are displayed.
  4. Set the Aggregate Name property of the AggregateControl node to identify this aggregation. The Aggregate Name that you specify must be contextually unique within an integration node.
  5. If you have separate fan-out and fan-in flows:
    1. Press Ctrl-S or click File > Save name on the taskbar menu (where name is the name of this message flow) to save the message flow and validate its configuration.
    2. Open the message flow that contains your fan-in flow.
  6. Select the AggregateControl node to open the Properties view.
    The node properties are displayed.
  7. Set the Aggregate Name property of the AggregateReply node to the same value that you set for the Aggregate Name property in the corresponding AggregateControl node in the fan-out flow.
  8. Press Ctrl-S or click File > Save name to save the message flow and validate its configuration.

What to do next

In IBM® App Connect Enterprise, fan-out and fan-in flows were also associated by sending control messages from the AggregateControl node to the AggregateReply node. This facility is no longer available. For optimum performance, do not connect the AggregateControl and AggregateReply node. However, if you do want to use control messages in your aggregations, and you want to connect these two nodes, see Using control messages in aggregation flows.