ARB (Automated Recurring Billing) with Silent Post Question

[kcassata]

We are currently utilizing your ARB (Automated Recurring Billing) with Silent Posts to update a customer's system.

We have an ASP.NET site running IIS with Server Intellect hosting. This month we processed over 1000 successfully, however 3 transactions we show no record of receiving.

Our customer does not see this as an acceptable solution, so we are trying to figure out what options we have. The first thing we do on the silent post is log the post with log4net.  If we fail processing the silent post, we should still have the log.  For these three messages there is no log.

Based on this we have concluded one of three things could be happening:

1. Our logging is not working for those three messages, but we received them.

2. Authorize.net sent us the message but the site was down.

3. Authorize.net did not send us the messages

Can you confirm what would happen if our silent post is down because some component on the website is down IIS, ASP.NET, etc. Will Authorize.net try to resend the silent post message later if we send a 500 error, 404 error, etc?  Also, if you can provide any help or other ideas, it would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Kevin

[TechStu]

Unfortunately they try to send it once and only once...

From the ARB SOAP guide:

"A Silent Post request must be accepted within 2 seconds, otherwise it will be aborted. If you decide to use Silent Post, it is important that your Silent Post URL is simply used as a method of collecting and dumping response data into a database or file for your use separately at a later time. Otherwise, the likelihood of your Silent Post URL failing to accept the responses we send will be much higher. A Silent Post is sent only once and it is not possible to have them re-sent to you at any time."

[kcassata]

Thanks TechStu,

I read that but i was surprised there was never a retry if the site is completely down (i.e. 404 or 500 error returned before 2 seconds). So just to confirm, if the site is down for an hour because our hosting company has a problem. Any silent post that was attempted durring that time will never be sent to us?  How do people usually handle these situations so that they still receive the message?  

I want to provide the customer with a possible solution, even if it is a manual download of transactions.

Thanks,

Kevin

[TechStu · Accepted solution]

As far as I know, the only other option would be to enable the ARB specific emails notifications within your account along with the silent post.  You should at least get an email confirming the transaction's status.  In the test environment, the summary email contains two .csv files (one for Successful and one or Failed transactions).  Assuming you'd get a similar email in production (I'm not sure as I haven't tried it yet - maybe someone else can confirm), you might be able to parse those files to double check that you received all of the silent posts.