Reception awareness overview

Reception awareness is a reliability feature that allows your organization (sender) to know whether the trading partner (receiver) received the message intact and that the message was not tampered during the transmission. When a message is received, the receiver sends a receipt to the sender. In addition to meeting the reception awareness requirements, the receipt indicates that the receiver was able to process the message and send the message to the business application.

Reception awareness in an outbound flow

If reception awareness is enabled in the conformance policy that is associated with an outbound exchange profile, the sender receives a receipt after a message is sent to a trading partner. Receipt is the acknowledgement from receiver, confirming the request was received and processed. Additionally, the receipt indicates whether the receiver delivered the message to the business application. If a digitally signed message is sent to a trading partner, the receipt contains a nonrepudiation element. The nonrepudiation element contains the digest of the message and is signed. If an unsigned message is sent to a trading partner, the receipt contains a user message element with information about the message that was sent. This is called pure reception awareness.

If the sender does not receive a receipt (or an error message) by a specified time after sending a message, the sender tries to resend the message (based on the retry configuration in the conformance policy, the number of retries and the retry interval). If the sender does not receive a receipt even after the configured number of retries is completed, the business application is notified that the receiver did not receive the message. The notification message includes information about the number of retries, the interval between the retries, and that a receipt was not received.

Retries cannot be configured for a synchronous message exchange pattern because, in a synchronous exchange, the sender receives a receipt or an error on the same HTTP or HTTPS connection. If the sender does not receive a receipt, the transaction is failed and the business application is notified.

Reception awareness in an inbound flow

If reception awareness is enabled in the conformance policy that is associated with an inbound exchange profile, the receiver sends a receipt to the sending trading partner. If the inbound message is signed, the receipt that is sent contains the non-repudiation data. If inbound message is not signed, the receipt contains a user message element with information about the message that was sent. This is called pure reception awareness.