Automatically retry failed messages
If a message a fails to send you can retry sending the message automatically. Either on the same channel or on a different channel.
If this example we’ll setup a retry trigger that will automatically retry sending a message over a GSM channel if it fails to send over an SMPP channel.
This example will walk through the configuration of the following items:
- Setup a retry / failover trigger
- Add a coloring rule to an existing view so retried messages are highlighted.
Before starting please make sure that you have already configured these channels:
- An SMPP channel. You can use the default setting to connect to the test and demonstration gateway
- A GSM channel or any other backup SMS channel.
Setup a retry / fallback trigger
We’ll create the fail-over trigger from a trigger template.
To start creating the failover trigger
- Open the SMS Server manager application
- Click on the ‘Triggers‘ section in the tree view on the left
- Click on ‘New Trigger‘
- Select ‘Retry/Failover Trigger Template‘ and click ‘OK’
Trigger Template – Retry Failover
We’ll name the trigger: ‘FALLBACK‘. With the description ‘Automatic Fallback‘.
In this example we’re using ‘VBScript‘ as the language for the generated file. In this case it doesn’t matter what we select. If you intent to customize the generated trigger script later on please choose the script language that you are most comfortable with.
In the next page we need to select the channel that we’re monitoring for failed messages and the channel that we want to failover to. Instead of a failover to a different channel you can also specify a number of retries that should be attempted.
Retry/Failover Trigger – Channels
After creating the trigger make sure to enable to trigger so it will automatically start working.
Add a coloring rule to existing views
Now that we have our retry trigger in effect it would be great to instantly see if the trigger was applied to a message. This way we can easily see if there are problems with a channel.
To edit the view ‘All SMS (Last 500)‘ you can right-click on the view in the tree on the left of the screen. Select ‘Edit View…‘ to start editing the view definition.
Next click on the ‘Colors‘ tab to edit the color rules. In the colors view click on the green ‘Plus‘ button to add a new rule.
SMS Manager – Colors
Now we want to highlight messages that have been retried. For this the condition needs to be ‘retries > 0‘. You can find which fields are available to make a condition by clicking on the ‘Insert Field‘ button.
Click on ‘OK‘ to add the new rule.
Next we need to make sure that the color rules are in the right order. This is because if the message was retried on a different channel but failed anyway it should be colored red instead of yellow. That means that the retry color rules should be applied before all others.
You can move the retry color rule up by selecting the rule and clicking the ‘Up arrow‘ button until it’s on the top.
Color rules – Order
That’s it. If you click on ‘OK‘ and ‘OK‘ again on the edit view dialog you will see that the new color rule is applied immediately.
SMS Server Manager – Retries in Yellow
You can repeat this process for any other view that should highlight retried messages.