You can configure a local or client connection to IBM® MQ to enable your IBM App Connect Enterprise message flows to access messages on WebSphere MQ queues.
If you intend to use IBM App Connect Enterprise to process WebSphere MQ messages, you must install WebSphere MQ in addition to installing IBM App Connect Enterprise. On distributed platforms, if you want to connect to a remote queue manager to process WebSphere MQ messages, you must install either an MQ Client or an MQ Server on the same machine as IBM App Connect Enterprise, in addition to installing an MQ Server on the machine that is running your queue manager. On z/OS®, WebSphere MQ is a prerequisite for IBM App Connect Enterprise, and only local connections to queue managers are supported. WebSphere MQ is available as a separate installation package, and your IBM App Connect Enterprise license entitles you to install and use WebSphere MQ with IBM App Connect Enterprise. For more information, see Installing IBM MQ.
You can connect to a secured WebSphere MQ queue manager (local or remote), by passing a user name and password to the queue manager when the connection is made. You can also choose whether to use the SSL protocol when a client connection is made to a remote queue manager. For information about securing connections to WebSphere MQ, see Connecting to a secured WebSphere MQ queue manager.
You can choose to configure either a local or client connection between your integration node and your queue manager, depending on the configuration of your existing architecture. If your queue manager is running on the same machine as your integration node, you can specify a local connection, either by choosing a specific queue manager to be used for the MQ node or by using the queue manager that is specified on the integration node. Alternatively, if WebSphere MQ is installed on separate machines from IBM App Connect Enterprise, you can define a client connection, either by configuring the connection details on the MQ node or policy, or by specifying a client channel definition table (CCDT) to control the client connection information. For more information, see Configuring a client connection to WebSphere MQ.
An MQEndpoint policy dynamically controls the connection properties that are applied at run time. You can use a single MQEndpoint policy for multiple MQ nodes, so that when you update the connection properties in the MQEndpoint policy, the updated properties are automatically applied to all MQ nodes that have the policy attached. You can also specify a default MQEndpoint policy for all flows that are deployed to an integration server by setting the mqConnector property in the server.conf.yaml file to the name of an MQEndpoint policy (see Configuring an integration server by using the server.conf.yaml file).
All MQ nodes that do not have either MQ Connection properties set, or an MQEndpoint policy specified, use the connection details of the queue manager that is associated with the integration node at run time. If no queue manager was specified for the integration node, the message flow cannot deploy.
By default, a thread that is processing WebSphere MQ messages becomes idle when it has not received any messages on its input queue for 1 minute, at which point the connection times out. However, you can change the length of time after which a connection for an idle message flow is released, by setting the sharedConnectorIdleTimeout property of the mqsichangeproperties command. For more information, see WebSphere MQ connections.