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Fraser,
I know that "be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you emit"
is firmly embedded in the race memory now, but I am not sure that that
applies to the technical aspects of B2B type transactions.
Why do you want to process messages that "may" be processable? If you
keep in mind a distinction between technical processes and business
processes, there is less doubt. Technically acceptable messages should
enable the business process. Acceptance of the message should mean that
there is a business process that will handle the message. Rejection of
the message should indicate technical issues. Anything else is probably
not scalable in terms of effort and in terms of guaranteed processing
time. It seems to come down to whether the business rules for fixing
the message data can be defined and used. We need to be careful that we
are not also fixing the semantics of the messages that we receive.
If there are business rules that define the changes to data content that
are acceptable then there is no doubt about whether the message can be
processed, what is in doubt is whether in the end you get a business
transaction (money) out of it.
If there are technical issues with a message, if the received structure
is wrong or unexpected for some reason, then the semantics are also in
doubt and passing what is probably machine generated data to a person to
resolve an issue involves asking that person to decide whether this is a
bug or something unexpected in the mind of a programmer. It is easier
and more reliable to ask the originator what is going on than it is to
ask a human to interpret a broken XML structure for, for example, a
purchase order (meaning that I am not sure that you can always push the
message to a person to have them look at it in a scalable,
business-meaningful way).
If this is B2B type traffic, who pays for getting the semantics of the
message wrong? If you receive a value transaction from someone and
"fix" it in some technical and non-trivial way, who now pays for the
transaction? Is the cost of sending and receiving the message so high
that the time and effort of a human and the associated risk of further
error is warranted?
Greg
Fraser Goffin wrote:
> Recently I've been involved in building a validation process using a
> combination of schema based and rules (schemaTron) and it got me
> thinking about how much validation is the right amount.
>
> The 'type' of validation processing I'm talking about is that which
> might be performed at a B2B gateway and is perhaps better categorized
> as 'technical' validation (ie. basic structural conformance and some
> content) rather than business rules (although the distinction is
> pretty thin).
>
>> From the business perspective, it is undesirable to reject any
>> message and
>
> thus lose an opportunity to complete a transaction. So from this point
> of view one might imagine that validation at this stage should be
> minimal, perhaps not even full schema (or perhaps a 'more relaxed'
> version of the published interface). This might be justified on the
> basis that rules, perhaps in a business process engine or application
> logic, are better at determining whether a message is business
> processable or not. Plus one can always push messages to a manual
> process and let a human decide !
>
> On the flip side, we want to protect the integrity of our operational
> systems from erroneous data and, perhaps the most obvious reason,
> validation can provide an optimization of the process in the sense
> that, when the interaction is asynchronous (and possibly long
> running), it may be preferable to let a caller know right away that a
> message has some 'bad data' rather than for them to find that out some
> time later after having received an initial acknowledgement of receipt.
>
> To me this highlights the conundrum of a desire for strongly typed
> [service] interfaces versus the looser coupling and tolerance to
> change that we also typically seek. I am trying to find the 'sweet
> spot' that allows through messages that 'may' be processable, but
> rejects those where even if directed to a manual (human workflow)
> process would still not be worth the effort. I sometimes refer to this
> as 'compatible' messages versus enforcing strict adherence to a
> technical specification.
>
> I also have noted that versioning service interfaces (or even just XML
> schemas) can be somewhat problematic and can exacerbate validation
> issues, and to some extent mitigates against using them for validation
> purposes, particularly if they haven't been designed with any
> extensibility mechanisms at all to accommodate 'non breaking' change
> (e.g. xs:any/anyAttribute).
>
> Some of you may be thinking 'is there a question here anywhere ?',
> sorry I have meandered on somewhat. What I'm really after is finding
> out what others have found to be a good approach to message validation
> and whether there are views about how to achieve a balance between
> optimizing business opportunity and rejecting 'junk mail'.
>
> Cheers
>
> Fraser.
>
>
>
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