A guaranteed delivery transaction has two attributes that determine how long it stays active: the time-to-live (TTL) and the retry limit. The TTL specifies the number of minutes that a transaction is to remain active. The retry limit specifies the maximum number of times that the Job Manager is to resubmit a request. A transaction becomes inactive when the TTL or the retry limit (if specified) is reached, whichever comes first. When a transaction becomes inactive, it remains in the job store, but the Job Manager no longer attempts to submit the request.

The client application or service sets the TTL (and optionally, the retry limit) with the startTx () method, which it uses to start a guaranteed delivery transaction. See Creating a Java Client that Uses Guaranteed Delivery and Creating a Flow Service that Uses Guaranteed Delivery for additional instructions and sample code.

These values determine the degree of tolerance the client application or service has towards transient network and server errors that occur at run time. Specifically, they determine the length of the outage that the client application or service considers transient. An outage that exceeds these limits will be deemed unrecoverable by the Job Manager and will cause the Job Manager to return an error for the request.