[Quickfix-developers] Bug in Session::sendRaw.

[Timothy Y. <ty...@pa...>]

There is an bug in Session::sendRaw, which may cause a sequence number to be
consumed without any message actually being sent.

For example, session-level reject messages are not sent if the session is
not logged in.  In such cases, an empty message (empty string) is committed
to the message store and the outbound sequence number is incremented.  This
causes the session to be irretrievably broken.  If the client asks for the
missing message, an exception is thrown on attempting to parse the empty
message from the message store.  In the current quickfix release, this will
cause the client's resend request to be ignored.

The attached acceptance test definition illustrates this problem by sending
a logon message with a bad sending time.  This seems like a slightly
artificial test case.  However, we have seen a large number of instances of
this problem which were caused by something other than bad sending time.  We
are still trying to ascertain exactly which outbound messages were being
suppressed.

I am not certain what the correct behaviour should be for this test case.
Should the reject still be sent, or should it be suppressed?  I think it
should be suppressed because the normal way to reject a logon is either with
a logout or a disconnect.   Ideally, the logout text should include the
reason for the problem (i.e. sending time inaccuracy), otherwise it could be
very difficult for the client to ascertain.

 <<5000_STA.def>> 
Tim Yates
Lead Developer 
Patsystems (US) LLC 
141 West Jackson Boulevard
Chicago 60604, USA 
Tel +1 (312) 542-1336 
www.patsystems.com 


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