The ups and downs of MQ Reconnect – little problems

This is one topic in a series of blog posts.

• The ups and downs of MQ Reconnect – the basics
• The ups and downs of MQ Reconnect – what do I need to do to get it to work?
• The ups and downs of MQ Reconnect – the classic MQ scenarios
• The ups and downs of MQ Reconnect – how can I tell if automatic reconnect has happened?
• The ups and downs of MQ Reconnect – little problems.
• The ups and downs of MQ Reconnect – frustrating problems.

Your error messages contain the wrong queue manager name

• You have an application which does
• MQCONNX
• MQINQ queue manager – get queue manager name
• MQOPEN MYREPLY
• MQOPEN SERVER
• MQPUT SERVER
• MQGET MYREPLY
  MQDISC.

You are a professional application programmer, so you used MQINQ to extracted the queue manager name, and produce event messages like.

“MQGET from MYREPLY queue on QMA reason code: MQRC_NO_MSG_AVAILABLE”

If you reconnected to a different queue manager before the MQGET, your message will be wrong. You will have people looking for a problem on QMA – when the problem was actually on QMC.

In your MQCB exit you can have logic

case MQRC_RECONNECTED:

    printf("%sEVENT : Connection Reconnected\n",TimeStamp);

    MQINQQMNAME(hConn,QMNAME);

    break;

Where the MQINQQMNAME does

MQOPEN on the queue manager object,
MQINQ Selectors[0]=MQCA_Q_MGR_NAME;

and stores the queue manager name in global storage.

Your error message can now use this global storage and report

“MQGET from MYREPLY queue on QMC reason code: MQRC_NO_MSG_AVAILABLE”

Your error messages still contain the wrong queue manager name

Using the same scenario as above, you look into why there was no reply to be got. The MQADMIN team look at the status of the server queue, and say “the last time a message was put to the server queue was 4 weeks ago. It must be an application bug”.

You need some logic like

MQPUT(...)
PutQMNAME = QMNAME; // from the global storage above 
                    //  this might be QMA

Now if you get no reply message, your error message can be like

“MQGET from MYREPLY queue on QMC reason code: MQRC_NO_MSG_AVAILABLE.  Message was put to SERVER queue on QMA at 14:40:23”.

Any MQSETs are not repeated.

If you issue an MQSET, and then reconnect to another queue manager, the MQSET is not repeated.

Best practice is not to use MQSET.

The attributes you can change, are for triggering and inhibit get and inhibit put, all of which would be better done using automation.

There are limitations as to what you can and cannot do.

See here.

For example

• getting a message under cursor, or in a group.
• using a message context
• using a security context.