SXMB_MONI and BPM acknowledgement status updates

[Steven_UM]

Hi folks,

We have a scenario in place where we deliver an IDOC to the backend system via the 'send' step and we had acknowledgement property set to 'transport' as we believed that the IDOC adapter would at least return us with exception information when something went wrong with the delivery of the IDOC. We also added 'deadline' monitoring as well to prevent the BPM of 'waiting forever' ... In case of exceptions or deadline, an alert is thrown.

This concept worked fine during development testing - IDOCS with status 56 or even 51 got picked up and resulted in error ... ( huray )

Once tested in acceptance it didn't work at all anymore and all our BPM's ended up in the deadline branch - even for those IDOCS that were processed successfully ...

After reading SAP note 'Note 837285 - BPE TS: Acknowledgments in the BPE' we understood that the BPM does not support transient errors and as such our concept would never work as we intented it but still it did in development ... even worse it worked sometimes in acceptance as well ...

After a while we figured out that it worked when we ran transaction SXMB_MONI while the BPM was still waiting for the acknowledgement ... so basically this transaction triggered somehow the update of the acknowledgement status and as such the BPM continued as expected ...

Then we noticed as well that the transaction even updates statuses of messages of previous days ... ( the BPM for those was obviously allready completed due to deadline ... )

We are a bit 'lost' here on the whole concept ...

We read the 'How to handle Acknowledgements' PDF with ALEAUDIT but that only works for logical systems which is not our case ...

Why is the SXMB_MONI transaction updating the acknowledgement statuses ? How does it do that - what does it check ? ( we noticed that although IDOCS had status 56 we still got a positive ack status )?

In general it seems that using BPM with send step and waiting for ack with the IDOC adapter is useless due to the transient ack status ( as explained in the note ) ... is that assumption correct ?

Regards,

Steven

[thorsten_nordholmsbirk · Accepted solution]

Hi Steven,

I can't answer your specific questions, but it occurs to me that the <a href="http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/44/a1b46c4c686341e10000000a114a6b/frameset.htm">new functionality in SP18</a> to turn received ALEAUDs into "normal" XI request messages may provide a workaround for your problems. The transformed ALEAUDs could be routed to your BPM by way of a correlation on the IDoc number. This way you could react to <i>all</i> ALEAUDs regardless of status...

Regards,

Thorsten