Outbound messaging system

The WebSphere Commerce messaging system allows you to manage all aspects of defining and sending messages generated within WebSphere Commerce. It allows you to control the manner in which administrators, customers, back-end and fulfillment center systems are notified of various events, such as customer orders or system errors.

To configure the outbound messaging system use the Administration Console. The messaging system can send messages using transports such as e-mail using SMTP and file using UTF-8 encoding. For e-mail the supported outbound protocol is SMTP, the message encoding depends on the preferred language of the user, and the store/site default language. Optionally, you can configure the messaging system to send messages to a back-end or fulfillment center system using WebSphere MQ.

The outbound messaging system provides a highly customizable messaging environment. These features include the following:

Note: Ensure transport attributes, for example e-mail addresses, and file locations are valid. The Messaging System does not validate attributes; incorrect attributes will result in failure to send the message.

How the outbound messaging system works

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The messaging system uses a plug-in model that implements the Java 2 Enterprise Edition Connector Architecture (J2EE/CA) to provide a common interface between the system and the various transports. During administration of the system, Site Administrators can perform the following tasks:

At run time, when a message is generated by a WebSphere Commerce messaging system, the following events occur:

  1. The appropriate profile is retrieved for the message type. If no store profile exists for that message with the corresponding active transport, the site profile is used. The profile is used to determine what transport method and settings are used.
  2. If the message uses the composition service, a JSP page is used to generate the message.
  3. The message is sent through the run time interface to the transport, which delivers the notification.

The use of a common interface with external transports allows the implementation details of the transport to be kept separate from the operation of the messaging system. This architecture makes it possible to plug in additional transports that adhere to the J2EE/CA interface.

Note: 3 new transports -- HTTP, Web services over HTTP, and Web services over JMS, have been added as part of WebSphere Commerce Enhancements for version 6. Follow the link provided to obtain the required updates.

Outbound messaging system administration

The administrator configures the transports that can be used by the site, or stores within the site. If a particular transport is active at both the site-level and the store-level then the message type to transport assignment at the store-level will take precedence. If a transport is not active at the store-level, then the message type to transport assignment for the site-level will be used.