AS2: Connecting Websphere BIC Express and GXS

[skas2]

Hi,

although I am quite new to AS2 I have already digged deep into IBMs Websphere Business Integration Express. For test I wanted to exchange messages with a partner running GXS Enterprise System 7.6.

The problem arises when they try to send messages to my system because WBIC Express uses HTTP basic authentication to derive the recipient for the message (or the MDN as it were) whereas the GXS system does not provide any means to specify a username and password.

After checking our support lines we both got messages acknoledging this:

GXS said: no, we don't support HTTP BA, but will in upcoming releases

IBM said: yes HTTP BA is mandatory in WBIC Express, but won't be in upcoming releases.

Has anyone of you any experience whether there is any way of connecting those two drummond certified product?

(Very cool certificate that is, when two certified products don't work together /irony)

Any help highly appreciated
Kind Regards
skas2

 

[skas2]

Taking this process one step further I can provide the answer to my first question myself now. But then I'll post a new one.

There were two solutions to the aforementioned problem: first is: install the FixPack (Update) for IBM WBIC Express and set

bcg.connector.servlet.RequireAS2BasicAuth=false
bcg.connector.servlet.UseBasicAuthenticationUID=false

in conf/bcg.properties.

The second solution offered to me, which we couldn't get to work correctly, though, was to provide username and password for BA in the URL

http://user:pass@host:port/input/AS2

Now for the next question:

WBIC Express is a bit picky when it comes to content types. So when I allowed the sending and receiving of binary content for a participant, setting the content type to "application/octet-stream" I get an error stating that the message coming in contained an "unknown content type". For the sending direction I could send a message (binary as well) and received an MDN for it. While at my partners site the messages looked just fine I got an error that the MDN failed MIME-type parsing.

Has anybody any clues about this?

Kind Regards
skas2