When you complete this guide, you will have a fully-functional, secure B2B document exchange pipeline over the AS2 protocol
Janaka Bandara
Published: 01 Aug 2022
This is the process that you would usually follow in AS2 Gateway (or any other AS2/EDI/MFT application) to exchange messages with your trading partners.
The same steps are explained in detail in our Quick Start Guide.
- Depending on whether you only need to either send messages or receive messages, only one of the last 2 steps may be required.
- If you encounter issues during any of the above steps, refer to the troubleshooting guides or contact AS2 Gateway Team for free support.
If you have a low volume of files to send or receive, the above steps may be sufficient; as long as you are happy with submitting and downloading messages by hand, through the web console.
However as and when your volume grows, you may need an easier and more reliable integration of the overall process with your existing business systems. In such cases you can use one of the integration mechanisms to plug AS2 Gateway directly into your business automation pipeline.
AS2 Gateway may introduce additional integration types in future, such as ability to submit/receive messages through a Google Cloud Storage bucket or Azure Blob storage - similar to how it is currently supported for AWS S3 buckets.
Once AS2 submission and retrieval is automated, you would need to ensure that any failures in the overall flow get notified to you, promptly and reliably:
With the web interface or REST API, message/file submissions are synchronous; if there is a rejection, you would receive an error message immediately as the response of the submission itself.
However with other integrations, e.g. SFTP, submissions are asynchronous; there is no reliable mechanism to inform the client that the uploaded file was not properly enqueued for delivery after the upload has been completed.
There are two main reasons for SFTP rejections:
In these cases, AS2 Gateway will:
error directory that is at the same level as the uploaded outboxIf the file was uploaded to a completely invalid path, AS2 Gateway may not be able to perform either of these; however the chances of such an issue on an automated setup would be negligible.
Once an AS2 message is submitted for sending, AS2 Gateway will make a best-effort attempt to deliver the message. However there are scenarios that can force it to “give up” and mark the message as a permanent failure:
To capture above cases, you can:
failures count)After you complete these steps, you would have a fully-functional, secure B2B document exchange pipeline over the AS2 protocol - free of installation and and maintenance complexities, affordable with pay-as-you-use pricing, and ready to scale with your business needs.
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