TRANSFER Programming Manual

Recipients
Developing TRANSFER Applications
8–4 40970 Tandem Computers Incorporated
Recipients How many recipients will be defined in your application? Will they be grouped into
distribution lists? Will all recipients receive identical packages?
Decide what action a recipient of a package takes, such as adding items to it or
forwarding it to another recipient. Do correspondents need to acknowledge package
receipt? Do packages require a reply from the recipient to the sender? A receiving
correspondent can reply to a sender in any of the following ways:
Acknowledge the delivery without reading the package
Acknowledge the delivery after reading the package, but without performing any
other processing
Acknowledge the delivery after fully processing the package
Packages Define the characteristics of the packages that correspondents exchange. Consider
such factors as:
What kind of information does the package contain, and in what arrangement?
The TRANSFER delivery system does not process the contents of packages;
instead, applications define packages, items, and record types for their own
purposes.
Is the order in which packages arrive at a depot important? Your application can
embed sequencing information inside packages and provide agent code to process
packages in sequence.
Is the time window in which packages will be delivered a consideration? If so,
you may need to distinguish between recipients that are batch applications
running only at night and online applications that are active during the day. You
may also need to analyze the daily availability of devices that are recipients of
packages.
Who receives the packages? Processes or human correspondents?
How are correspondents related to one another, and how are packages
interrelated?
Decide whether to require certification of package delivery. Consider whether return
packages will be more useful or more annoying to the sender, and whether the need
for certification warrants the additional package traffic.
Transactions After considering these factors, define the various transactions that will involve
extended (nowait) processing. Such transactions normally begin when a
correspondent composes and sends a package. The end of the transaction, however,
depends on your application. For example, you can define a transaction to end at any
of the following points:
When an agent at the last recipient's depot receives notification that the package
arrived
When the last intended recipient saves the package in a folder or deletes it