RE: Multiple jobs reading same keyed data queue

Yes and Yes.  See detail in line

Christopher Bipes
Information Services Director
CrossCheck, Inc.

-----Original Message-----

What I have been thinking about is to create another data queue
(PostedOrd) keyed on order number, and have the AS/400 posting program
write the order number just posted to the PostedOrd data queue when the
posting is complete.

The web order program would read the keyed PostedOrd data queue by the
order number they want to confirm.  Their program would just sit there
until the AS/400 side writes the order number to the data queue.  I am
thinking that they could use the AS/400 tool box for Java class
KeyedDataQueue


My questions are:

1) Can multiple separate web order programs read the keyed data queue
PostedOrd for the specific order number they are interested in without
conflicting with each other.  In other words, if one web order is
waiting for his order to be posted, can another web order be waiting for
another order to be posted at the same time and can they read
asynchronously?  We have a system where we have multiple web servers
sending transaction to the same queue to be processed, then waiting for
the response in a keyed queue.  Each web server / instance waits for
their response by key.  The works rather well.  We actually use one
queue with a blank key for new request and keyed response.  That is the
processing program waits for key = 0 while the server instance waits for
the key that was sent in the data.  We actually have NEPS running
waiting at the queues to process the requests as they come in.  We also
timestamp the initial queue write and if a request has been on queue
more than xx time, we fire off another processing job.

2) If the above works, will there be any lock problems when the AS/400
side writes to the data queue?
There are no problems with locks if you do not try to allocate the queue
in the program.  The data queues APIs do not put locks on the queues.

Any other suggestions?  Should would like a charm, you are on the right
track.

During the development process, the web order currently keeps 
checking the production files every 5 seconds for the order they are 
interested in.  After 20 seconds it figures there has been some kind 
of error.  This is not the solution we want to go with

This is not a high volume web site like Amazon, but a company web 
site where the sales reps can enter their orders.

Thanks



Dave Murvin
DRM Enterprises, Inc.