Manage data notifications

Data notifications and notification instance life cycles

A data notification is a configured object that runs in a data location and listens to a particular trigger. When a trigger occurs, a notification instance is created to process this trigger, call a named query and send data to the configured target.

Data Notifications and Notification Instances have different life cycles.

Data notifications life cycle

The life cycle of data notifications is handled by two different statuses:

  • The Active flag (trigger status) indicates whether a Data Notification should process new triggers. It is shown in the Data Notifications table.

    Administrators can change this flag by clicking the data notif activate Activate or data notif deactivate Inactivate button on a data notification:

    • If the Active flag is set to true, the notification will process new triggers.

    • If the Active flag is set to false, the notification will no longer process triggers (scheduled or batch completion). The administrator can still send manual notifications.

      • By default, a new Data Notification is created with an Active flag set to false and has to be activated by an administrator.

      • You can only edit a Data Notification when it is not active.

  • The Processing Status reflects the current activity of a Data Notification. This value is handled by the platform and is shown on the Data Notifications table.

    Possible values for the Processing Status are:

    Processing status Description Processing queued notifications Available actions

    Waiting

    Ready to process incoming (queued) data notification instances. As soon as a new data notification instance is queued by a trigger, the data notification starts processing it and moves to the Processing status.

    Yes

    Send manual notifications (if trigger Active = false)

    Processing

    Processing notifications, including those in the queue.

    • If more notifications are in the queue after the current processing, the notification remains in that status until the queue is empty.

    • When the queue is empty, it reverts to the Waiting status.

    • If the administrator kills a notification being processed, the data notification moves to the Suspending status.

    • If the data notification fails while processing an instance, it moves to the Suspended status.

    Yes

    Suspending

    Killing notification instances per administrator request. Once all instances have been killed, the data notification moves to the Suspended status.

    No

    Suspended

    The notification has failed, became invalid, or was killed by an administrator. It is waiting for the administrator to fix the issue and resume it.

    No

Notification instances life cycle

The execution status reflects the state of a notification instance and is shown on Data notification logs. This status can have the following values:

  • Running: The notification is being processed.

  • Successful: The notification was sent successfully.

  • Failed: The notification has failed.

  • Killed: The notification was killed by an administrator.

  • Waiting for Retry: The notification is waiting to retry.

Execution and administration

Designers and administrators can monitor and manage data notifications from the Application Builder. The following actions are available:

Activate/deactivate

By clicking the data notif activate Activate or data notif deactivate Deactivate button on a data notification, an administrator may set the Active flag (trigger status) on a notification at any time, allowing it (or not) to process new triggers.

Validate

An administrator can check if a data notification contains invalid properties by clicking the data notif validate Validate button on the data notification editor.

Send manual notifications

The data notif send Send Manual Data Notification action allows launching a data notification manually for test or recovery purposes. This action is available only if the data notification is inactive (Active status = false). To run a manual notification, the administrator must provide the values of Low Batch ID and High Batch ID to use.

Set low batch ID

The data notif set low batchid Set Low Batch ID action allows defining the value of the low batch ID for a data notification. This action is available only if the notification is inactive (Active status = false). This action can be used:

  • When a data notification is created, to define the first batch ID that should be included in the notifications instances.

  • To replay notifications starting from a certain point in the past.

  • To skip some data updates.

Kill

An administrator can stop a notification instance that is being processed by clicking the data notif kill Kill button. This action is available only if the data notification status is Processing. When an administrator kills a notification, it is moved to the Suspending status, then to Suspended.

Resume

An administrator can resume a Suspended data notification using the data notif resume Resume button. This action is available only if the data notification’s status is Suspended.

Two options are available:

  • Resume with a cleared queue (return to the Waiting status).

  • Resume and process the queue (return to the Processing status): With this option, all messages from the notification instance that was interrupted will be sent again, and other instances in the queue will be processed.

This action is available regardless of the trigger status. Resuming an inactive data notification allows running failed notification instances, possibly fix the notification before making the notification able to process triggers.

Data notification logs

An administrator can consult ongoing and previous notification instances in the data notification logs. The following details are available:

  • ID: unique identifier of the notification instance.

  • Status: see Execution status.

  • Low Batch ID and High Batch ID processed by this instance.

  • Attempts: number of attempts to send the notification messages.

  • Message Count.

  • Record Count.

  • Query Duration.

  • Sending Duration.

  • Data notification logs can be consulted using the Semarchy xDM REST API. Refer to the REST API documentation.

  • Data notification logs are cleaned with the data location data purge jobs.

Manage data notifications with the REST API

Using the Semarchy xDM REST API, administrators can:

  • Consult the configured Data Notifications

  • Access the Data Notification logs.

  • Get the status and runtime information of a Data Notification.

  • Kill a running notification.

  • Resume a suspended data notification.

For more details, see the REST API documentation.