Blind Processing

Description

This method is what you may find in the integration sample pack code. The nature of this method is that the merchant’s system is not aware of the ‘state’ of the gateway entry points (be that up and live or perhaps down with an outage of some sort).

How It Works

The way this method utilises the multiple gateway entry points is by ‘blindly’ firing all transactions

to entry point 1 first. If this entry is up, the transaction will be processed and the response message

returned as expected. If that entry point is down it will timeout and then the merchant’s system will fire the same transaction to the next entry point. Again, if this entry point is live, the transaction will be processed, if it is not, it will timeout. The merchant’s system will keep ‘blindly’ firing transactions to each of the gateway entry points in succession until the transaction is processed by one of them, or, all entry points have been tried.

Pros

The main advantage of this method is that it is incredibly simple to implement. The integration sample code can be pretty much used as is direct out of the sample files in a live environment.

Cons

If the first entry point is down, then every transaction will be fired at it regardless, meaning that it will then need to time-out this attempt before it attempts the next gateway entry point, so transaction processing will be longer in times of entry point outage, i.e. each transaction will need to independently realise that an entry point is down, but then never pass on this “knowledge” to the next transaction.