HTTP Sender and REST conventions

Question

I'm writing a C# Web API server application, and will send JSON to it via a Mirth HTTP Sender destination. This post is about how to handle error conditions. Specifically, there are three scenarios I want to handle:

1. Sometimes we take the C# application server offline for a short period for system upgrade or maintenance, and Mirth is unable to connect at all. I want Mirth to queue all messages in order, and when the server is available, process them in the order they were received.
2. The server receives the request, but rejects it due to a problem with the content of the request, e.g., missing a required field. In accordance with REST conventions, the server will return a 400-level HTTP response. This message would be rejected every time it's submitted, so it should not be re-sent; just log the failure and move on to the next message.
3. The server receives the request, but something goes wrong on the server, and the server returns an HTTP 500 Server Error response. This would be the appropriate response, for example, when something in the server environment has gone wrong. One real-world example was the time the Web API server was running, but somebody rebooted the database server. REST conventions would suggest we continue to resend the message until the transient problem has been resolved.

For #1, initially I had it queue on failure/always, but it appears the response transformer never runs for messages that were queued (at least, the debug statements never showed in the log). I have turned queueing off, and set it to retry every ten seconds for an hour, and that seems to give the desired behavior. Am I on the right track here, or missing something?

For #2 and #3, returning any HTTP 400 or 500 error invokes the 1-hour retries. What I want is to apply the 1-hour retries for the 500 errors, but not the 400 errors. I’ve tried responseStatus = SENT in the response transformer, but the response transformer only runs once, after the hour has expired, and not for each retry.

This seems like a common problem, yet I’m not finding a solution. How are the rest of you handling this?

Answer 1

You're close!

So by default, the response transformer will only run if there's a response payload to transform. For connection problems, or possibly for 4xx/5xx responses that contain no payload, the response transformer won't execute.

However, if you set your response data types (From the Summary -> Set Data Types dialog, or from the Destinations -> Edit Response, Message Templates tab) to Raw, then the response transformer will execute all the time. The reason being that the Raw data type considers even an empty payload to be "transformable".

So turn queuing back on, and set your response data types to Raw. Then in the response transformer, if you look at the Reference tab there's a category for HTTP Sender:

You'll want the "response status line", that's the "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" line of the response that contains the response code. Here's a response transformer script that forces 4xx responses to error:

if (responseStatus == QUEUED) {
    var statusLine = $('responseStatusLine');

    if (statusLine) {
        var parts = statusLine.split(' ');
        if (parts.length >= 2) {
            var responseCode = parseInt(parts[1], 10);

            // Force 4xx responses to error
            if (responseCode >= 400 && responseCode < 500) {
                responseStatus = ERROR;
                responseStatusMessage = statusLine;
            }
        }
    }
}