WCF - Transaction Scope - cannot enlist while sending to queue within - wcf

I am having a WCF service which is configured for TransactionScopeRequired = true. It performs following actions.
1) Receives message from the transactional queue
2) Open a transaction scope(new transactionScope()) with in the Service Operation
3. Calla Java Webservice
4) Send results to a transactional queue.
While sending message to a transactional queue it is throwing error "Cannot enlist transaction".
Could anyone please guide me on this?
Thanks
Rakesh

The absence of details (e.g. service and client binding configuration) makes providing a specific response/guidance difficult.
In terms of general guidance, you may want to enable WCF Tracing and Message Logging, which will allow you to monitor/review the WCF transactions and hopefully discover additional information about the issue.
The following links provide a good overview:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733025.aspx

Related

MSMQ and multiple wcf-services on different servers reading from the very same queue

I'm aware of that there are a couple of posts here on SO that discusses this issue, but I can't figure out a straight answer to my scenario.
Lets say i have:
One queue on Server-A with alot of messages coming in
One WCF service with NetMsmq binding on Server-B reading from Server-A's queue
The very same WCF Service deployed to another Server-C with the same binding reading from Server-A's queue
Am I guaranteed that the services on Server-B and Server-C will never process the same message?
Are there any other problems with this setup that needs to be taken care of?
The purpose of this setup with multiple wcf services reading from the same queue is to increase processing speed, and I do not want to use a hardware loadbalancer.
Thanks for your time!
You will need to make your queue transactional and then set the exactlyOnce property on the binding to true.
Reference:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel.msmqbindingbase.exactlyonce(v=vs.110).aspx
This should take care of it. You can have multiple readers (WCF Services) reading from the same queue. That's basically a load-levelling concept and is the intent of queue-based messaging. Here is some background documentation on WCF and MSMQ.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms789048(v=vs.110).aspx

Correlate MSMQ End-to-End trace with WCF Trace and application level logging

Background:
I'm troubleshooting a problem where messages sent by WCF over transactional MSMQ (with netMsmqBinding) seem to disappear. The code that uses WCF is in a third-party assembly which I cannot change. I have few clues to what the problem is, but plan to enable various tracing capabilities in order to pin-point where the problem relies.
Context:
I have enabled MSMQ End-to-End Tracing. It logs two events for every message that gets sent.
One event when a message is written to the outgoing queue. This message contain the MSMQ message id (which is composed by a guid and an integer, ie 7B476ADF-DEFD-49F2-AF5A-0CF27C5152C0\6481271).
Another event when that message is sent across the network.
I have enabled verbose WCF Tracing.
I also have application level logging that logs a message IDs defined by the application code (let's call this the "application message id").
I have enabled positive and negative source journaling on the MSMQ messages that get sent.
I have enabled journaling on the receiving queue.
Problem:
When messages go missing, I know the missing message's application id (it's logged by the sending side). I would now like to look at the End-to-End trace to see
whether the message was written to the outgoing queue or not.
How can I correlate the events in the End-to-End trace with the application level logs and WCF traces?
Ideas:
When sending a MSMQ message using the managed MSMQ API in System.Messaging, the message's MSMQ id is available after the message is sent. However, I have not found a way to log this when WCF is performing the send operation. The WCF trace logs a MSMQMessageId guid, but this value is, surprisingly, not the actual MSMQ id as I guessed it would be. Is it possible to access the actual MSMQ message id and log it?
Log the native thread id in the application log along with the application level id and a time stamp. The native thread id is logged to the End-to-End trace by MSMQ, so this might actually be sufficient to correlate. This is plan B for me if I don't find a more elegant solution.
You sounds like you're on the right track. However you could bump up a bit with this:
Using SvcConfigEditor.exe
Configure WCF Verbose Tracing for Propagate ACtiveity and Activity tracing
Configure WCF MessageLogging for "Malformed Messages, Service Messages, Transport Messages"
Use LogEntireMessage
In End to End, trace it All
Make sure you enable these *.config on BOTH sides, yours and the 3rd party executable.
Collect your logs files, and add them ALL to SvcTraceViewer.exe
You can configure windows MSMQ to sense subjects of messages and if subjects contains a key word fire an application. This application can logs incoming messages. In sender side you can write actual message id into subject of message and add your key word to subject. In receiver side fired application can access to actual message id near added key word in subject.
It looks like your message is being discarded by WCF because it is malformed in some way (i.e. contract mismatch, one of the WCF message size limits exceeded).
To trap this error you could write an ErrorHanlder that audits these errors.
Here a link to a sample of doing that.
Another option ,if you are using Win 2008 R2 and up, is to use the built in poison message handling. here`s a link to the the docs.
To the question, to trace end to end with an application trace identifier:
I would pass the application trace id in the message header (look here for an example).
To audit the message header on the service side i would use WCF's IOperationInvoker to intercept each call, and audit the id in the messaged header.
This can be configured in the config file for the process without altering the third party code.here`s an example of how to implement an invoker and how to set it in config.

Setting up MSMQ in a WCF application to ensure reliable mail delivery

So I have been tasked with setting up MSMQ so that if our mail server goes down (which is seems to often) the messages just end up in the Queue and will be delivered when they come back up. With that said I have to say I don't know much about this except what I have learned in the past 24 hours however I believe I know enough to take the right approach but I wanted to ask someone in the community because there is some confusion amongst my colleagues given some existing setup in our WCF application.
Currently we have some services that use msmq as the protocol for the endpoint. the endpoint looks like this
<endpoint address="net.msmq://localhost/private/Publisher"
behaviorConfiguration="BatchBehaviour"
binding="netMsmqBinding"
bindingConfiguration="MSMQNoSecurity"
contract="HumanArc.Compass.Shared.Publisher.Interfaces.Service.IPublisherSubscriber"
name="PublishSubscriber"/>
This of course lets the client make a service call and if for some reason the service wasn't up it will ensure that when the service comes back up the call will be processed. What I don't think that it will do is if you have something like the following in you service method.
try
{
smtp.Send(mail);
return true;
}
catch (System.Net.Mail.SmtpFailedRecipientException ex)
{
throw new Exception("User Credentials for sending the Email are Invalid",ex);
}
catch (System.Net.Mail.SmtpException smtpEx)
{
throw new Exception(string.Format("Application encountered a problem send a mail message to {0} ", smtpHostName),smtpEx);
}
WCF isn't going to retry and send the message again somehow, am I correct about this assumption?
What I think we should have is something that looks like the following in place of the call to smtp.send() above. (from http://www.bowu.org/it/microsoft/net/email-asp-net-mvc-msmq-2.html)
string queuePath = #".\private$\WebsiteEmails";
MessageQueue msgQ;
//if this queue doesn't exist we will create it
if(!MessageQueue.Exists(queuePath))
MessageQueue.Create(queuePath);
msgQ = new MessageQueue(queuePath);
msgQ.Formatter = new BinaryMessageFormatter();
msgQ.Send(msg);
Then somewhere in the startup of the service (I am not sure where yet) we set up an event handler that will actually call send() on the SmtpClient object. Something like this
msgQ.ReceiveCompleted += new ReceiveCompletedEventHandler(msgQ_ReceiveCompleted)
So to sum it all up my first question is which way is better? Create a service that uses net:msmq as the protocol or just change the email method to put messages in the queue and set up a handler for it? The next question, if my assumption about changing the method that calls SmtpClient.Send() is correct then where in the program should I wire up ReceiveCompleted? Out WCF service is hosted in a windows service, meaning there is actually a call to ServiceBase.Run(servicesToRun). Is there a place I could wire it up there? My experience with WCF is with much simpler IIS hosted services so I am not 100% sure.
Thanks - I realize this is a long question but I have been trying to research it and there is a lot of information and I can't seem to find a clear explanation of the benefits of doing things one way vs another.
Your approach to using msmq to address availability in a downstream dependency (in this case your smtp server) is valid. However, there are a couple of things you should understand about msmq first.
If you create a queue in msmq then by default it is non-transactional. In this mode the queue will not provide the kind of guaranteed delivery semantic you require. So create your queues as transactional.
Then you can tell WCF that your service operation will enlist in the transaction when it receives a message for processing. You do this by defining a behavior on your service operation implementation:
[OperationBehavior(TransactionScopeRequired = true, TransactionAutoComplete = true)]
public void SendEmail(Something mail)
{
....
smtp.Send(mail);
}
TransactionScopeRequired tells WCF that the service operation should enlist in the same transaction used to transmit the message from sender to receiver. TransactionAutoComplete states that the service method should commit the transaction once the operation has successfully completed. So in answer to your query above, a failure in the service operation will cause the transaction to rollback.
What happens at this point depends on your service bindings configuration.
<netMsmqBinding>
<binding name="netMsmqBinding_IMyServiceInterface"
exactlyOnce="true"
maxRetryCycles="3"
retryCycleDelay="00:01:00"
receiveErrorHandling="Move"> <-- this defines behavior after failure
...
</binding>
</netMsmqBinding>
When, for whatever reason the transaction is not committed (for example, an unhandled exception occurs), WCF will roll the message back onto the queue and retry processing once per minute up to 3 times (defined by maxRetryCycles and retryCycleDelay).
If the message still fails processing after this time then the receiveErrorHandling attribute tells WCF what to do next (The above binding specifies that the message be moved to the system poison message queue).
Note: exactlyOnce tells WCF that we require transactions, that each message will be delivered exactly once and in the order they were sent.
So your original approach is in fact correct and you just need to configure your service correctly to implement the behavior you want.

MSMQ WCF examples (non System.Messaging)

Yes, I have googled and there are loads of samples out there but each and every one is configured differently or is not quite what I am looking for.
I am trying to find a sample where I have MSMQ set up. I want a WCF Service which gets notified as and when a message arrives in the MSMQ queue.
I also want then a client application which binds to that contract and sends a message, placing it in the MSMQ queue.
Can anyone provide examples or links? I'd greatly appreciate it. I'm just getting confused between different types of messaging, different bindings.... list goes on. I am NOT looking for a System.Messaging implementation.
Thank you.
You can find plethora of examples on MSDN Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Samples for .NET Framework 4. When you expand the package look under \WCFWFCardSpace\WCF\Basic\Binding\MsmqIntegration for some basic samples
EDIT:
For transactions it's as simple as:
[OperationBehavior(TransactionScopeRequired = true, TransactionAutoComplete = true)]
public void SubmitPurchaseOrder(MsmqMessage<PurchaseOrder> msg)
{}
You can read more about Poison Message Handling on MSDN More about the MSMQ on MSDN - How to: Exchange Messages with WCF Endpoints and Message Queuing Applications
"When the service reads messages from the target queue under a transaction, the service may fail to process the message for various reasons. The message is then put back into the queue to be read again. To deal with messages that fail repeatedly, a set of poison-message handling properties can be configured in the binding. There are four properties: ReceiveRetryCount, MaxRetryCycles, RetryCycleDelay, and ReceiveErrorHandling. "
EDIT: You would use System.Messaging on the service side.

WCF transactions

I imagine the following WCF service usage: (of a cash acceptor)
Service Consumer 1 Service Consumer 2
cashAcceptorService.BeginTransaction(); cashAcceptorService.StopDevice();
//this should throw exception: device is locked / used in a transaction
cashAcceptorService.AcceptMoney();
cashAcceptorService.EndTransaction();
Service Consumer 1 and 2 use the same WCF single instance. I wonder if this functionality is already implemented. Do WCF transactions offer this?
How do you see this done?
If the following is true:
The service is interacting with a transactional object (eg the database)
The service has transaction flow enabled
Then WCF does indeed offer this.
The client can then use the TransactionScope class. Any transactions initiated on the client will flow through to the service automatically.
using(TransactionScope transactionScope = new TransactionScope())
{
// Do stuff with the service here
cashAcceptorService.AcceptMoney();
//
//
transactionScope.Complete();
}
Handling transactions in WCF tends to be an entire chapter of a book, but this should be enough information to get you on the right track.
It is always better to understand the concept of distributed transactions . I recommend to read this article http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/35087/Truly-Understanding-NET-Transactions-and-WCF-Imple