How to trigger a transfer failure from Validation command

[Arif Shaon]

Hello List,

I am trying to implement a validation command as part of AM preservation planning. While the command itself gets invoked by MCP-client and produces the desired result, any negative outcome however, does not cause the transfer to fail - only the step is marked as "Failed".

Am I missing something?

Thanks very much in advance for your help.

Best

Arif

[Sara @ Artefactual]

Hi Arif,

Some failures in Archivematica are considered critical - virus scan failures, checksum failures - and some are considered non-critical. Critical failures will lead to the failed transfer workflow, while non-critical failures will not. Non-critical failures alert the user to an issue with the material that does not threaten the integrity of the transfer as a whole. In some cases the user may decide that the failure is acceptable; for example, a validation failure on a single PDF could be very minor and the user could decide that the risk is very low, especially if they're working at the scale of thousands of documents per transfer.

I don't think there's any way to make a non-critical failure, like validation, result in the transfer failing. I believe that this is hard-coded in the workflow; that is, there's no way to trigger validation to end up as a failed transfer without rewriting the workflows, which is a complex undertaking.

I'm trying to find a master list of which failures can cause a transfer to fail, but am not turning anything up - I'll keep looking.

Regards,

Sara Allain

Systems Archivist

Artefactual Systems, Inc.

[Arif Shaon]

Hi Sara,

Thanks very much for your reply.  Your explanation of the  distinction between critical and non-critical failures in AM is very useful indeed.

Unfortunately, the use case that I am trying implement does regard validation failure as critical - i.e. the SIPs shouldn't be ingested if they fail validation. And checking this manually is not a sustainable option either due to the large number of SIPs that need to be processed.

I suppose I could have a script or process that deals with the validation before the SIPs are submitted to AM but that is an extra step that needs to be managed outside AM.

So. your suggestion to look at the workflow configuration seems to be a viable option for now.

I have managed to have some success by changing the fallback link for the validation process "a536828c-be65-4088-80bd-eb511a0a063d" in workflow.json to the process (61c316a6-0a50-4f65-8767-1f44b1eeb6dd  ) that deals job termination and emailing error report .  Of course this will need to be maintained and reapplied when we update AM in future.

Thanks again for your help.

Regards

Arif

[Sara Allain]

Glad to hear it was helpful!

For reference, here's a list (though it may not be complete) of the critical failures in Archivematica: https://www.archivematica.org/en/docs/archivematica-1.11/getting-started/troubleshooting/error-handling/#errors-that-fail-transfers

--

Sara Allain, MI (she/her)

Systems Archivist

Artefactual Systems, Inc.

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[Arif Shaon]

Hi Sarah,

Thanks again for the list.

Best

Arif

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[Stephen Klein]

Great list and thank you!

Best,

Stephen Klein

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