Connection Testing cannot be enabled for a pool when the ManagedConnectionFactory does not implement ValidatingManagedConnectionFactory

Applies To: Oracle SOA Suite/Weblogic 10g,11g,12C

I was trying to set below set below JCA Adapter connection pool properties to true. The values I was setting them to is mentioned below.

Test Frequency Seconds: 300 (Default 0)
Test Connections On Reserve: True (Default False)

I was trying to set it for a Oracle MQ Series connection pool. The customer reported that the MQ adapter stop picking message from the Websphere MQ once the system went down for maintenance e.g. queue manager unavailable. After confirming the MQ system was up and running the connecting SOA interface/composite had to be restarted to make the system pick messages. With my past experience with datasource connection pools I thought I could fix this issue by forcing the adapter to validate connections to MQ system periodically. I could easily achieve this by setting above connection pool parameters. Ideally above setting mean that the MQ connection pool checks for the MQ system to be present every 300 seconds and only passes valid connections to application when it tries to reserve a connection to the MQ system. Theoretically I got it all figured out until I applied the settings and the logs reported below issue ! 


weblogic.management.DeploymentException: Connection Testing cannot be enabled for a pool when the ManagedConnectionFactory does not implement ValidatingManagedConnectio
 nFactory. The following invalid settings have been detected:test-frequency-seconds is set to non-zero
   [Connector:199167]test-connections-on-reserve is set to true


The adapter would not come up till I reverted my settings back ! So what happened? 

On further research (googling of course) I could find that only if a resource adapter's ManagedConnectionFactory implements the ValidatingManagedConnectionFactory interface, then the application server can test the validity of existing connections. Refer to Testing Connections section here. 

 As per Oracle Metalink doc ID 957853.1 Oracle MQ adapter does not use above stated interface hence as per the error in logs connection validity can't be tested ! Hence enabling connection test setting like below for the MQ series adapter won't work as expected and you will get above mentioned error.

Test Connections On Create:
Test Connections On Reserve:
Test Connections On Release:

So now the question remains, is there a way we can work around this known limitation? Well I think it is possible. Oracle Metalink doc ID 957853.1  declares this issue as Bug 8913481 & Bug 8918056. The note prescribes applying patch 8918056 (MQAdapter fix) to fix above explained issue. But the patch applies to older version of BPEL (10.1.3.4) 

I would encourage you to present this analysis to Oracle and request a patch for above mentioned bugs for newer versions of Oracle SOA Suite/Middleware like 11g/12C. I got the above issue on Oracle SOA Suite version 11.1.1.7.8. I reached out to Oracle and they asked me to apply the patch for bug 21689260.

On a side note this issue is also relevant for other Oracle adapters available with SOA Suite. As per Oracle Metalink Doc ID 1282064.1 testing of the Apps adapter and DB adapter connection factories via the WebLogic console is not supported since the ManagedConnectionFactory of both adapters does not implement ValidatingManagedConnectionFactory due to performance considerations (during runtime) and due to the fact that the DB/Apps JCA connection is just a shallow wrapper around a data source connection handle.

Soumya Mishra