Handling errors in message flows

The broker provides basic error handling for all your message flows. If basic processing is not sufficient, and you want to take specific action in response to certain error conditions and situations, you can enhance your message flows to provide your own error handling.

The options that you can use to do this are quite complex in some cases. The options that are provided for MQInput nodes are extensive because these nodes deal with persistent messages and transactions. MQInput is also affected by configuration options for WebSphere MQ.

Because you can decide to handle different errors in different ways, there are no fixed procedures to describe. This section provides information about the principles of error handling, and the options that are available, and you must decide what combination of choices that you need in each situation based on the details that are provided in this section.

You can choose one or more of these options in your message flows:

If you include user-defined nodes in your message flow, you must refer to the information provided with the node to understand how you might handle errors with these nodes. The descriptions in this section cover only the built-in nodes.

When you design your error handling approach, consider the following factors:

The general principles of error handling are:

The Error Handler sample demonstrates how to use an error handling routine to trap information about errors and to store that information in a database. The error handling routine is a subflow that you can add, unchanged, to any message flow. The sample also demonstrates how to configure message flows to control transactionality; in particular, the use of globally coordinated transactions to ensure overall data integrity.

Related concepts
Message flows overview
Deployment overview
WebSphere Broker JMS Transport
Related tasks
Using subflows
Creating a message flow
Defining message flow content
Editing configurable properties
Related reference
Built-in nodes
WebSphere MQ Enterprise Transport
WebSphere MQ Mobile Transport
WebSphere MQ Multicast Transport
WebSphere MQ Real-time Transport
WebSphere MQ Telemetry Transport