MQSeries.net :: View topic - Need some help developing a log to File flow

jrsetters

We are implementing MQ in a healthcare environment for HL7 transactions. The transition has been challenging for the interface analysts here because we all have experience working with native HL7 engines and are learning development in MQ from the ground up.

We've developed a pretty good model flow for the HL7 transactions with a lot of help from consultants, but one feature of our current environment we are attempting to reproduce are text file logs of the message transactions. In our flow this is an important troubleshooting tool because it allows us to access messages at the point where failure was noticed without having to debug inside of Message Broker. It also allows easy access to a 3rd party HL7 transaction parser.

My flow works like this:

I capture the HL7 message from the sending system using the Healthcare HL7 Input node. From there I process it, validate, and remap the data as required by the receiving system and then send it back out. During this process I capture both the raw incoming message and the ack/nak from the receiving system in a journal queue.

I then created a simple logging flow that dumps the contents of the journal queue to a FileOut node. The problem with this method is that the FileOut node has a Close terminal that has to be triggered before MQ will write our file to our desired destination (it holds it in a temporary folder until it closes). This is mostly ok because we want to have many messages in each log file and our server team will run an automated process to retrieve and archive the files nightly. But I need to determine how to reliably trigger the Close terminal.

Right now I am attempting to use a TimeoutNotification node that is set to auto archive and update the local file every several hours. But this appears to only work the first time, after which it just appends to the temporary file forever.

Does anyone have a good flow model for this type of activity? Ideally we'd like the FileOut to close at a set time every day. But if that is impossible then it is ok to have it triggered in intervals.

I am using toolkit 7.0.0.2 and MQ 7.0.1.5

Thanks in advance