Is it possible to receive a synchronous response using the IMS API(ION)?

Hello All

We are using ION for INBOUND through IMS API services.

The target system requires receiving response values in a synchronous. In other words, they want to receive response values indicating whether the data was successfully received in EAM and whether there were any errors

not the HTTPS response....

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unknown

ION is an asynchronous platform that guarantees message delivery to the destinations. So the HTTPS response that IMS sends back is the confirmation that the message will be (eventually but definitely) delivered to EAM. If EAM likes or dislikes the message and if the sender should know about it or not is all to do with messaging patterns and who is the system of record.

If the sender of the message is the System of the record & if EAM is receiving that message, then the sender ideally doesn't bother if EAM successfully processed it or not. Because, the copy that the sender has is the true copy and if EAM rejects it, its EAM's loss. Not the sender's. In this case, the sender would have sent a message with a Sync verb. And theoretically speaking, there could be (and usually there are) multiple subscribers for such data syncs where the message processing will succeed at the hands of many subscribers, while others may fail to process it because of data errors or other reasons.

If the sender of the message is a satellite system of this data and if EAM is the system of the record, it essentially means the sender is asking EAM to process the data it has, create its official copy of truth on the EAM side and confirm back. In this case the sender would send a message with a 'Process' verb based BOD and EAM would acknowledge back with a corresponding 'Acknowledge' BOD indicating if the message was successfully processed or rejected. And in case of a success, it follows through the Acknowledge with a sync BOD with the latest true copy of that data.

On both the above cases, if there are errors in this transaction, ION or EAM would send a confirm BOD back to the error management console which can be monitored and a notification can be sent to users/ admins. And a correction action can be taken (either solve the data issue on the receiver and resubmit or re initiate the transaction from the source)

This is in short the guiding principles of an asynchronous integration. If the sender needs immediate response from EAM, then ION is not the correct integration platform for this. Please call the EAM APIs directly from your source system (via Infor OS API Gateway if you need additional API management for this call). Hope this helps.

khj0801

Hello Vignesh,

Thank you for the detailed explanation.

For the interface between the source system and the target system (EAM), the reason for opting for synchronous communication is to synchronize data between both sides.

For example, in the source system, a process has been implemented to proceed with the next steps upon receiving an "S" response from EAM, and if an "F" is received, it triggers a rollback to delete the corresponding data. (This is why real-time handling of response values from EAM is crucial in the current scenario.)

Ultimately, the process involves receiving the HTTPS response and sending an ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. Developing a process to receive response values asynchronously is a requirement for the source system.

I have a couple of questions:

(1) Is there only an IMS API process within ION for sending data in real-time (immediately after creation in the source system)? Are there any other options within ION?

(2) Regarding the processing for synchronous communication between EAM and the source system, does it mean that the source system needs to send data in XML (SOAP) format via the Infor OS API Gateway? Can't ION handle the transfrom?

unknown

Hello HJ,

The synchronous expectation you mentioned is what the Process-Acknowledge pattern provides like to like, but in an asynchronous way. To answer your question:

Think of an IMS call as a means to trigger an ION Data flow. Once triggered, the flow is always asynchronous. And as I mentioned, ION is an asynchronous platform that doesn't provide sync data retrieval or signals from the target systems whatsoever. If you have a synchronous need, you would have to consider a API gateway based option.. and there are a quite a few options there such as:
1. Call the EAM API in the gateway directly
2. Think of an API flow to chain APIs
3. Think of the new Backend as a service add-on module that lets you build your own API
ION API Gateway has inbuilt transformation policy capability, which can convert your incoming request to a format expected by the target API. So clients can send the API request in their native format and you can do the transformation on the gateway layer if needed.

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