JCA/EIS Connection Test Functionality

[weston.price]

Would it make sense to think about providing a testConnection() method, or some other type of functionality for JCA/EIS connections. If we expose something like this (most of the other app servers I have worked with provide this type of 'ping' type behavior after deployment), this may free up a lot of the unwanted 'Can't Connect to X Host' type questions we seem to see a lot. If not, is this something we are planning on providing equivalent behavior in the new management stuff?

Weston

[adrian.brock]

Yes, there are already tasks to improve the monitoring.
e.g. Background checking of the connections in the pool

I think this already is a spec defined ValidatingManagedConnectionFactory?

[weston.price]

Yeah, I understand at the spec level, however, I was just wondering if we want to put something closer to the user in terms of them being about to invoke the functionality (on demmand) directly.

[adrian.brock]

This would just be a front end to that api.
But, in general, how would you know what parameters to use to create the connection? You don't know how to construct the CRI.
See the prefill feature request for issues.

[weston.price]

Yeah, prefill would fit the bill in this case. For JDBC based connections, I know that in servers like WAS (and I think Weblogic) there is always a 'Test Connection' feature that allows for stuff like this, but it may well be covered in other areas of our design.