Error Handling

Introduction to Errors

It varies a lot how many integrations Link customers have, and the number of daily processed documents is of course also varying. But regardless of the size, it is for sure that sometimes, integration errors will occur.

It's of course important to do what you can to avoid errors, but it is almost more important that you are able to discover them and react swiftly and relevant according to the situation.

You need to be in control of:

• What happened?
• Who should be informed?
• Who should take action?
• What is the solution?

When running perhaps thousands of integrations in a production environment, this is quite a challenge. 

Luckily, Link provides vital functionalities that can help your organization to catch and handle errors as they occur.

What is an "Error" and what does Link do in relation to it?

In Link context, we consider an "error" to be that one document (i.e. one chunk of data) did not successfully go through it's corresponding distribution.

There could be an infinite number of reasons what went wrong, but to give a few examples:

• The document contained invalid characters
• The document had missing data segments
• The document contained invalid values
• The document could not be delivered to the planned endpoint

The important thing to understand is that whichever the problem, Link will:

• Collect all relevant information about the document (this happens for all documents - even when they don't fail)
• Collect all relevant information about the error
• Set the document status to "Failed"
• Optionally, send mails (or text messages) to relevant Stakeholder, document sender and/or receiver of the document with information about the error. 
  Note that the notification mails sent by Link by default contain a link to the Document detail page for the relevant document

To continue learning about error-handling, you should read the Stakeholders section next.

We also recommend reading the Self-service support for the business article in the "Link scenarios" guide.