General Enhancements

Edit online

In Sterling B2B Integrator version 5.2, several enhancements are focused on making it easier to use the Sterling Connect:Direct® Server Adapter and other related Sterling Connect:Direct Server services, such as the CopyTo service used to transfer files between a Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter node and other Sterling Connect:Direct server nodes. Here’s a summary of the general enhancements:

  • Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter upgrade now allows you to make changes to an existing netmap, which take effect immediately without disabling and re-enabling the adapter. Simply edit the configuration of the Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter that uses the modified netmap, click Next until you reach the Confirm page, and then click Finish for the system to immediately recognize your netmap changes.
  • Sterling B2B Integrator version 5.1 and later supports the most common set of parameters available in the Sterling Connect:Direct for z/OS® Process Copy statement To clause to provide more functionality, such as enhanced file allocation and disposition options for the destination file on the remote Sterling Connect:Direct for z/OS node. To ensure that business processes created in earlier versions of Sterling B2B Integrator continue to execute properly, parameters existing in versions 5.0 and earlier will still be supported. However, these old parameters cannot be mixed with new parameters in the same CopyTo service. It is recommended that you use the new parameters when you create a new business process and that when you make changes to an existing CopyTo service that you upgrade and use the new parameters, as well. For more information, search for Sterling Connect:Direct Server CopyTo Service.
  • To reduce the number of instances business processes that terminate with an error because of PNODE session limits, Sterling B2B Integrator now places business processes in a suspend queue to await session availability. When a session count frees up, it is assigned to the oldest suspended business process which can use the newly available session. The business process then resumes and is allowed to try to establish a session. For more information on this workflow suspension processing feature, see How Sessions for Business Processes Are Established.
  • Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter upgrade now allows you to take advantage of the checkpoint restart feature. This feature allows the automatic restarting of copy operations that fail in certain ways, for example, due to network errors. The copy operation is resumed from a previously checkpointed location rather than having to start over from the beginning of the file transfer. To implement this feature, you must enable retry processing. For more information, see How Checkpoint Restart and Retry Processing Works.

    In earlier versions of Sterling B2B Integrator, you had to specify a retry in the business process itself. In addition, in Sterling B2B Integrator version 5.1 and later, when a session is established the current retry counts are reset to zero so that if the session subsequently fails, the system starts counting retries from zero, which represents a departure from the earlier behavior.

    The copy checkpoint retry feature is now governed by the same short-term and long-term retries parameters that control retries for initial session establishment. Prior to Sterling B2B Integrator version 5.1, there were three sets of parameters related to session establishment and retry processing:

    • Session establishment parameters that were used only for initial session establishment. These two fields, Number of Retry attempts for establishing a session and Interval between session establishment attempts, were configurable in both the Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter and Sterling Connect:Direct Server Begin Session Service. These parameters did not affect session re-establishment after a session failure during COPY processing.
    • Short-term session retry parameters that were only used when the adapter attempted to establish a session but there was no PNODE session available. These two fields, Number of short-term session retry attempts and Interval between short-term session retry attempts, were configurable in both the Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter and Sterling Connect:Direct Server Begin Session Service. The server in that scenario would perform a series of delays and retries to try to acquire a free session count. These parameters controlled the retrying of the acquisition of a session count but had nothing to do with establishing sessions. This functionality has been made obsolete by the workflow suspension processing feature described above. With that feature, a business process is put in a suspend queue when there are no available sessions to await for the next free session count.
    • Checkpoint-based copy-restart parameters that were used only in CopyTo and CopyFrom processing. These two fields, Number of Retry attempts for checkpoint-based copy-restart and Interval between Retry attempts, were configurable in only the Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter When a COPY operation failed with a 'restartable' error such as a session failure, these parameters controlled the number of retries performed and the interval between retry attempts. This retry count was a hard limit on the number of retries that could be done during a given communications session regardless of whether sessions were re-established and then subsequently lost or whether a session failed and then could not be re-established. This set of parameters is now obsolete as a result of the enhanced copy checkpoint retry feature.

      Session establishment and retry processing has been both simplified and enhanced in Sterling B2B Integrator version 5.1. There are now two sets of parameters (short-term and long-term) instead of three and the two sets apply throughout the session both to initial session establishment and also to re-establishment after a failure. These two sets of parameters are configured in the Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter and can be overridden in the Sterling Connect:Direct Server Begin Session service:

    • Session establishment parameters, which are now the long-term session retry settings and apply both to initial session establishment as well as to COPY steps when a session must be re-established. When the default settings defined in the adapter configuration are overridden in the Begin Session service, the new values are retained for the duration of the session and also apply to any subsequent COPY steps.
    • Short-term session retry parameters, which now work in conjunction with the long-term session retry parameters. The values for the short-term parameters are used first if defined, and if a session has still not been established (or re-established) when they are exhausted, the long-term retry values are used, if configured. If the short-term values are overridden in the Begin Session service, the new values are retained for the duration of the session and also apply to any subsequent COPY steps.
  • File Allocation Retry (FAR) processing allows the Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter to retry a Copy operation when one of a set of certain file allocation errors occurs in combination with a non-zero return code. This is most useful when the Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter initiates a file transfer with a remote Sterling Connect:Direct for z/OS system. This feature only affects locally initiated (PNODE) sessions that use the Sterling Connect:Direct Server CopyTo service or CopyFrom service. For more information, see How File Allocation Retry Processing Works.
  • For interoperability with other Sterling Connect:Direct nodes in high-availability environmnents, the Alternate Comm Info parameter in the Sterling Connect:Direct Server Adapter Netmap allows you to specify a list of alternate hostnames and IP addresses that are used for Netmap checking of inbound connection requests to the adapter. For more information, see Alternate Comm Info.