How to Create the INTERFACES Section of the Configuration File


	BEA Home \| Events \| Solutions \| Partners \| Products \| Services \| Download \| Developer Center \| WebSUPPORT
	http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/index.html \| Site Map \| Search \| PDF Files \| Contact \| Glossary

Tuxedo Documentation \| Setting Up a BEA Tuxedo Application \| Local Topics \| Previous Topic \| Next Topic \| Contents

Note: This section applies only to the CORBA environments.in BEA Tuxedo.

The INTERFACES section in the configuration file is used to define parameters for CORBA environments in the BEA Tuxedo system. In this section, you define application-wide default parameters for CORBA interfaces used by the application. For a CORBA interface participating in factory-based routing, you define the interface names and specify the name of the routing criteria that the Tuxedo CORBA environment should apply to each interface. Factory-based routing is a feature that lets you distribute processing to specific server groups.

In addition to defining the INTERFACES section, you must specify routing criteria in the ROUTING section and the names of groups in the GROUPS section when you implement factory-based routing. For details about the parameters and more information about factory-based routing, see the section "How to Create the ROUTING Section of the Configuration File" in this chapter.

Specifying CORBA Interfaces in the INTERFACES Section

You indicate specific information about CORBA interfaces used by your application in the INTERFACES section of the configuration file. There are no required parameters. CORBA interfaces need not be listed if no optional parameters are desired. The INTERFACES section includes the following types of information:

Whether transactions should be started automatically (AUTOTRAN) (CORBA only)
The routing criteria to be used for factory-based routing for this CORBA interface (FACTORYROUTING) (CORBA only)
Load balancing information (LOAD)
Assignment of priorities to interfaces (PRIO)
Different service parameters for different server groups (SRVGRP)
Timeout value for transactions associated with this CORBA interface (TRANTIME)
Timeout value for processing a method for this CORBA interface (TIMEOUT)

Table 3-2 lists the AUTOTRAN, FACTORYROUTING, LOAD, PRIO, SRVGRP, TRANTIME, and TIMEOUT parameters characteristics.

INTERFACES Section Parameters Characteristics

Parameter	Characteristic
AUTOTRAN = {Y \| N }	For each CORBA interface, set AUTOTRAN to Y if you want a transaction to start automatically when an operation invocation is received. AUTOTRAN=Y has no effect if the interface is already in transaction mode. The default is N. The effect of specifying a value for AUTOTRAN is dependent on the transactional policy specified by the system designer in the implementation configuration file (ICF) or Server Description File (XML) for the interface. This transactional policy will become the transactional policy attribute of the associated T_IFQUEUE MIB object at run time. The only time this value actually affects the behavior of the application is if the system designer specified a transaction policy of optional. Note: To work properly, this feature may be dependent on personal communication between the system designer and the system administrator. If the system administrator sets this value to Y without prior knowledge of the ICF or XML parameters set by the programmer, the actual run-time effort of the parameter might be unknown.
FACTORYROUTING = criterion-name	Specify the name of the routing criteria to be used for factory-based routing for this CORBA interface. You must specify a FACTORYROUTING parameter for interfaces requesting factory-based routing.
LOAD = number	This is an arbitrary number between 1 and 100 that represents the relative load that the CORBA interface is expected to impose on the system. The numbering scheme is relative to the LOAD numbers assigned to other CORBA interfaces used by this application. The default is 50. The number is used by the BEA Tuxedo system to select the best server to route the request.
PRIO = number	Specify the dequeuing priority number for all methods of the CORBA interface. The value must be greater than 0 and less than or equal to 100. 100 is the highest priority. The default is 50.
SRVGRP = server-group-name	Use SRVGRP to indicate that any parameter defined in this portion of the INTERFACES section applies to the interface within the specified server group. For a given CORBA interface, this feature lets you define different parameter values in different server groups.
TRANTIME = number	If AUTOTRAN is set to Y, you must set the TRANTIME parameter, which is the transaction timeout in seconds, for the transactions to be computed. The value must be greater than or equal to zero and must not exceed 2,147,483,647 (231 - 1), or about 70 years. A value of 0 (zero) implies there is no timeout for the transaction. (The default is 30 seconds.)
TIMEOUT=number	The amount of time, in seconds, to allow for processing of a method for this CORBA interface. The values must be greater than or equal to 0. A value of 0 indicates that the interface cannot time out. A timed-out method causes the server processing the method for the interface to terminate with a SIGKILL event. You should consider specifying a timeout value for the longest-running method for the interface.

Specifying FACTORYROUTING Criteria

For each CORBA interface, the INTERFACES section specifies what kinds of criteria the interface routes on. The INTERFACES section specifies the routing criteria via an identifier, FACTORYROUTING.

University Sample

The University Production sample application demonstrates how to code factory-based routing (see Listing 3-3). You can find the UBBCONFIG files (ubb_p.nt or ubb_p.mk) for this sample in the directory where the BEA Tuxedo software is installed. Look in the \samples\corba\university\production subdirectory.

Production Sample INTERFACES Section

*INTERFACES

   "IDL:beasys.com/UniversityP/Registrar:1.0"
        FACTORYROUTING = STU_ID

   "IDL:beasys.com/BillingP/Teller:1.0"
        FACTORYROUTING = ACT_NUM

The preceding example shows the fully qualified interface names for the two interfaces in the University Production sample. The FACTORYROUTING identifier specifies the names of the routing values, which are STU_ID and ACT_NUM, respectively.

To understand the connection between the INTERFACES FACTORYROUTING parameter and the ROUTING section, see the section CORBA Factory-based Routing in the University Production Sample Application.

Bankapp Sample

Listing 3-4 shows how factory-based routing is specified in the Bankapp sample application.

Bankapp Sample Factory-based Routing

*INTERFACES
        "IDL:BankApp/Teller:1.0"
         FACTORYROUTING=atmID

*ROUTING
     atmID
            TYPE = FACTORY
            FIELD = "atmID"
            FIELDTYPE = LONG
            RANGES = "1-5:BANK_GROUP1,
                      6-10: BANK_GROUP2,
                        *:BANK_GROUP1

In this example, the IDL:Bankapp/Teller interface uses a factory-based routing scheme called atmID, as defined in the ROUTING section. In the ROUTING section, the sample indicates that the processing will be distributed across two groups. BANK_GROUP1 processes interfaces used by the application when the atmID field is between 1 and 5, or greater than 10. BANK_GROUP2 processes interfaces used by the application when the atmID field is between 6 and 10, inclusive.

Enabling Load Balancing

In BEA Tuxedo CORBA envirionments, load balancing is always enabled.

A LOAD factor is assigned to each CORBA interface invoked, which keeps track of the total load of CORBA interfaces that each server process has performed. Each interface request is routed to the server with the smallest total load. The routing of that request causes the server's total to be increased by the LOAD factor of the CORBA interface requested. When load balancing is not activated, and multiple servers offer the same CORBA interface, the first available queue receives the request.

For more information about load balancing in BEA Tuxedo CORBA environments, refer to "Enabling System-controlled Load Balancing," in the Scaling, Distributing, and Tuning CORBA Applications manual.

Support for parallel objects in CORBA environments has been added for release 8.0 of BEA Tuxedo, which introduces load balancing across mulitple servers in a local domain. For more information about parallel objects in BEA Tuxedo CORBA environments, refer to the "Using Parallel Objects" section in Scaling, Distributing, and Tuning CORBA Applications.

Controlling the Flow of Data by Interface Priority

You can control the flow of data in a BEA Tuxedo client or server application by assigning interface priorities using the PRIO parameter. For instance, Server 1 offers Interfaces A, B, and C. Interfaces A and B have a priority of 50 and Interface C has a priority of 70. An interface requested for C will always be dequeued before a request for A or B. Requests for A and B are dequeued equally with respect to one another. The system dequeues every tenth request in FIFO order to prevent a message from waiting indefinitely on the queue.

The PRIO parameter has the following characteristics:

It determines the priority of a CORBA interface on the server's queue.
The highest assigned priority gets first preference.
Every tenth request is dequeued FIFO.

Specifying Different Interface Parameters for Different Server Groups

You can specify different load, priority, or other interface-specific parameters for different server groups. To do this, you should repeat the interface's entry for each group with different values for the SRVGRP parameter.