Altova FlowForce Server 2025 Advanced Edition

AS2 (Applicability Statement 2) is a specification that enables exchanging files securely over the Internet. AS2 is used by businesses to exchange primarily EDIINT (EDI over Internet) and XML files through either HTTP or HTTPS.

 

This documentation includes references to the following publications:

 

RFC 4130, "MIME-Based Secure Peer-to-Peer Business Data Interchange Using HTTP, Applicability Statement 2 (AS2)", see https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4130.txt

 

Main Features

With FlowForce Server Advanced Edition, you can send messages in AS2 format to your organization's AS2 trading partners by means of FlowForce jobs. You can also receive AS2 messages from trading partners and further process or store them as required, effectively turning FlowForce Server into an AS2 Server.

You can optionally encrypt and sign AS2 messages sent to partners, with the help of digital certificates. To support encryption and signing (both as an AS2 data sending or receiving partner), FlowForce Server has a certificate store where you can import and manage centrally the public certificates received from all trading partners, and the public+private certificate pairs created by your organization. As a result, when you receive from other trading partners signed and encrypted AS2 messages, FlowForce Server can decrypt and verify the signature of such messages. Likewise, when you send encrypted and signed data, FlowForce Server prepares this data using the respective certificates previously imported into its store.

From FlowForce, you can optionally request that the partner send a synchronous Message Disposition Notification (MDN) in reply to an AS2 message sent from FlowForce Server. You can also request that the partner sign the MDN. When FlowForce Server acts as receiver of AS2 messages, it sends MDNs automatically in reply to received AS2 requests.

FlowForce Server can encrypt and decrypt data using any of the following algorithms: DES, 3DES, AES-128, AES-192, AES-256, RC2-40, RC2-64, RC2-128, RC4-40, RC4-128. It can sign or verify signed data using any of the following algorithms: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512.

Optionally, you can enable compression of sent messages (and you can flexibly specify if compression should occur before or after signing). When you receive compressed AS2 data from other trading partners, FlowForce Server automatically performs decompression of data if necessary (regardless of whether data was compressed before or after signing).

You can integrate jobs that send or receive AS2 data into your business data flows and customize them just like any other FlowForce jobs. For example, jobs can be triggered on demand or in a scheduled manner, have multiple execution steps, conditional processing, user access rights, and so on. In addition to this, they benefit from all the functionality provided by FlowForce Built-in Functions and FlowForce Expression Functions.

 

Limitations

Currently, FlowForce supports only synchronous MDNs (Message Disposition Notifications). Asynchronous MDNs are not supported.

The size of messages is limited by available system memory.

Basic HTTP authentication is supported (preemptive, credentials are included in the initial request). Digest authentication, or HTTPS authentication by means of client certificates are not supported.

Import of PEM files that contain only the private key (without certificate) is not supported.

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