Clarification About Delivery Report

Clarification About Delivery Report SearchSearch
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Anonymous
Posted on Wednesday, July 23, 2003 - 09:55 pm:   

I am Sikandar and working on MMS Client.

I have to enable delivery reports in our MMS Client. It will be a SILLY question for you but for me it is necessary for better understanding of DeliveryReports and ReadReports.

Question:
(1) Why there is a provision( According to spec 3GPP TS 23.140 ) of MATCHING the delivery reports to the sent MM by means of comaring message identification of the sent MM to the received delivery report ?
(2) What if some one has deleted the sent MM, How we would be able to perform such Msg ID comparison ?
(3) In the case (2) above if at all we store the Message ID for the deleted message how long we should retain it and for how many such messages( The messages which require Delivery Reports )?
(4) is this a better idea to sotre explictly the Message IDs and other information for comparison with delivery report on a mobile phone with limited memory?
(5) When we have the recipient address available in Delivery Report PDU why do we need to compare this address with the mulitple recipient to whome originally the message was sent?
(6) Why all this came in my mind is because since in delivery report we get the address of recipients so why can't we show the dellivery report to the mobile user as soon as we receive it since if user has requested a delivery report and if we have received it it surely means that message has reached the recipient (In case of read report if we have received read report then it means recipient has read the report. ) so what difference will it make if checking of message identification has not been done?

Please reply ASAP . I shall be beholden to you all .

Thanks in advance

Regards
Sikandar
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Posted on Wednesday, July 30, 2003 - 09:44 pm:   

Hi Sikandar,

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. We've had to concentrate on direct product support for the past week due to overwhelming interest in our latest beta release (http://www.nowsms.com/beta5).

I would not be overly concerned about these issues. The wording in the 3GPP specification is:


quote:

The originator MMS User Agent or VASP, i.e. the MMS User Agent or VASP receiving the delivery report, may match the delivery report to the sent MM by retaining the message identification of the sent MM and comparing it to the received delivery report, which shall contain the message identification of the original MM.




I've highlighted the "may" part of that statement, because I think that wording is significant. It is telling you what you can do, not what you have to do.

So, to your questions:

1.) Some user agents (such as the SonyEricsson T68i) maintain a log of sent MMS messages. As delivery reports are received, the user agent updates the status in this sent messages folder. There is not a requirement that you do things this way ... however if you are saving sent messages for any period of time, this can be a nice feature in a user interface.

(I mention that the T68i does this, and it is a nice feature ... but it is also annoying that as the T68i saves a copy of each outgoing message, it also makes you manually delete them when its storage gets full ... which is the most annoying feature about the MMS UA on the T68i.)

2.) Obviously you wouldn't be able to. It is a user interface decision for you to make on how to handle this. Either you could present the delivery report using a special form in the inbox, or you could display it on screen. (On the subject of annoying MMS user agent features ... on the T68i, if you are looking at the display when a delivery report is received it tells you that that the report has been received, and the display disappears after several seconds. Of course, if the sent message is still in your sent items folder, the status there is updated, otherwise the delivery report just disappears. On the 3650, the phone beeps, a brief message is displayed on the screen and then the message disappears ... so for a typical user the beep tells them to look at their phone, and by the time they get to the phone the message has disappeared completely. However you handle it, a disappearing alert like this is a user interface feature that will only confuse users. If you are not having a sent items folder, I would suggest simply displaying the notification message in the regular MMS inbox.)

3.) This is an implementation decision. There is no requirement to save anything.

4.) If you have limited memory, I would not worry about saving the message or message-id at all. If a delivery report is received, then display it in the MMS inbox.

5.) If you are tracking the status of a message that was sent to multiple recipients, then you can receive a delivery report for each recipient. So if you want to provide a user interface for the user to see messages that they have sent, and the status of those messages, then for a message sent to multiple recipients, you need to track each recipient separately.

6.) No difference at all. Your approach is fine. The 3GPP specification says may, so it is not a requirement. I'd interpret it as a suggested procedure if the client is going to provide a user interface for tracking the status of sent messages.

Hope that helps!

-bn