About the Ensemble IBM WebSphere MQ Adapters

The Ensemble IBM WebSphere MQ inbound and outbound adapters enable your Ensemble productions to retrieve messages from and send messages to message queues of Ensemble IBM WebSphere MQ. This chapter provides a brief introduction to these adapters.

It is assumed that you are reasonably familiar with the IBM WebSphere MQ product and have access to its formal documentation.

Prerequisites

In order to use Ensemble IBM WebSphere MQ inbound and outbound adapters, make sure that you have access to IBM WebSphere MQ as described in the chapter “Sending and Receiving IBM WebSphere MQ Messages” in Using Caché Internet Utilities.

The adapters use a dynamic-link library that is automatically installed by Caché on all suitable platforms. (This is MQInterface.dll on Windows; the file extension is different for other platforms.) In turn, the Caché dynamic-link library requires IBM WebSphere MQ dynamic-link libraries (the IBM WebSphere MQ client).

The IBM WebSphere MQ Inbound Adapter

In general, the inbound IBM WebSphere MQ adapter (EnsLib.MQSeries.InboundAdapterOpens in a new tab) accesses a given queue manager, using a given channel, retrieves messages from a given queue, and sends those messages (as instances of EnsLib.MQSeries.MessageOpens in a new tab) to the associated business service.

The adapter provides runtime settings that you use to specify items like the following:

The queue manager to use.
The channel specification to use. This specification includes the name of the channel to use, the transport used by the channel, the server name (or IP address) that is running the IBM WebSphere MQ server, and the port.
The message queue to check.
A polling interval, which controls how frequently the adapter checks for new input.

Note:

Each retrieved message must be less than 32 KB in length unless long strings are enabled in Ensemble.

The IBM WebSphere MQ Outbound Adapter

The IBM WebSphere MQ outbound adapter (EnsLib.MQSeries.OutboundAdapterOpens in a new tab) provides settings that you use to specify the following:

The queue manager to use.
The channel specification to use. This specification includes the name of the channel to use, the transport used by the channel, the server name (or IP address) that is running the IBM WebSphere MQ server, and the port.
The message queue to send messages to.

It provides a method to send a message to the given queue.

Note:

The message must be less than 32 KB in length unless long strings are enabled in Ensemble.

The MQ Adapters and the Event Log

Unlike many other Ensemble adapters, the IBM WebSphere MQ inbound and outbound adapters do not write to the Event Log when they process messages sent to or received from outside Ensemble. To see the inbound and outbound traffic, you can, however, use the message browser as usual.