Short version:
Can a property with multiple values somehow be promoted so that send ports can subscribe to one of the values in the list?
Long version:
In a database, I have mapping information, where we map people to locations. a person can work at multiple locations and location can have many people working at it. The relationship between locations and people (thousands of people) is maintained by an operations team using a well application which updates the database.
A message comes into Biztalk containing multiple people.
Currently, BizTalk receives the message, pulls out the list of people from the message, and dump messages into a sql database, with an associated list of people. SQL resolves the person/location relationships and writes a distinct list of locations to an associated table. We have a receive port that runs a query and publishes to the messagebox the message from the database with a promoted property that holds the location. From there we have multiple send ports, each that subscribe to a particular location.
The issue is that it is not an efficient process. The message gets published mutliple times to the Biztalk messagebox (once for inbound, and at least once for outbound).
Would it be possible to, using a pipeline component promote the locations that the message should go to, and then have send ports that subscribe to a particular location? The challenge is that some send ports need to be ReST, and some are SOAP, so the integration between locations can be different. I can't seen to find a way to publish multiple a property with multiple values, in a way that send ports can subscribe to one of those values. Looking for ideas...
Funny, this same situation came up just last week....anyway...
Yes, by using Bitwise And predicate in the filter. It's the & option. You'd have to map each location to a value (power of 2) but each property can support up to 32 options (64 if uint64 is supported which...umm....sorry, I just don't recall :)
If you need more than that, just add a second group filter, East, West or whatever.
Related
I have a REST API that will be facilitating CRUD from multiple databases. These databases all represent the same data for different locations within the organization (IE We have 20 or so implementations of a software package and we want to read from all of the supporting databases via one API).
I was wondering what the "Best Practice" would be for facilitating what database to access resources from?
For example, right now in my request headers I have a custom "X-" header that would represent the database id. Unfortunately, this sort of thing feels a bit like a workaround.
I was thinking of a few other options:
I could bake the Database Id into the URI (/:db_id/resource/...)
I could modify the Accept Header like someone would with an API version
I could split up the API to be one service per database
Would one of the aforementioned options be considered "better" than the others, and if not what is considered the "best" option for this sort of architecture?
I am, at the moment, using ASP.NET Web API 2.
These databases all represent the same data for different locations within the organization
I think this is the key to your answer - you don't want to expose internal implementation details (like database IDs etc.) outside your API - what if you consolidate? or change your internal implementation one day?
However, this sentence reveals a distinction that is meaningful to the business - the location.
So - I'd make the location part of the URI:
/api/location/{locationId}/resource...
Then map the locationId internally to a database ID. LocationId could also be a name, or a code, or something unique that would be meaningful to the API client.
Then - if you later consolidate multiple locations to the same database or otherwise change your internal implementation, the clients don't have to change.
In addition, whoever is configuring the client applications, can do so thinking about something meaningful to the business - the location they are interested in.
Can I access persisted data of running orchestration Instances from the BizTalk database?
My BizTalk application deals with long-running processes and hundreds of orchestration instances can be running at a time.
I would like to access data persisted by these orchestration instances and display it on my application's UI. The data would give an insight about how many instances are running and at which state each of them is.
EDIT :
Let me try to be a little more specific.
My BizTalk application gets ticket requests (messages) from a source and after checking some business rules they are to be assigned to different departments of the company. The tickets can hop between inbox of different departments as each department completes its processing.
Now, the BizTalk orchestration instances are maintaining all the information that which department owns a particular ticket at a given time. I would want to read this orchestration information and generate inbox for each of the department at runtime. I can definitely do this by pushing this information to a separate database and populate the UI from there BUT as all this useful information is already available in the form of orchestration instances I would like to utilize it and avoid any syncing issues.
Does it make any sense?
The answer to your specific question is NO.
BAM exists for this purpose exactly.
Yes it is doable. Your question is little confusing. You can't get the data which is persisted for your orchestration instance, however You can get number of running or dehydrated instances using various options like WMI, ExplorerOM library. As a starting point you can look at some samples provided as part of BizTalk installation under SDK\Samples\Admin folder. Also you should be looking at MSBTS_ServiceInstance WMI class to get the service instances. You can also look at a sample http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561219.aspx here. You can also use powershell to perform the same operation
I have a need to create a BizTalk 2010 application to poll information and I have found this useful blog Polling Oracle Database Using Stored Procedures, Functions, or Packaged Procedures and Functions.
My questions are 2 folds:
The blog hard coded the parameter for the procedure in the package in the polledDataAvailable and the PolledStatement. How do I pass the actual parameters that is going to change? For example, I want to have the ability poll all orders from a customer, and not just the customer hard-coded 'ABC'. The ID of the customer will be defined at real time.
Without using extra receive ports but just based BizTalk monitor (referring back to the blog), how do I examine the results (i.e. viewing the records being polled) on BizTalk monitor?
Maybe the parameter value seems to be hard coded to call the function in the query statement SELECT CCM_ADT_PKG.CCM_COUNT('A02') FROM DUAL , but the real parameters values are passed to the generated instance from the input schema in the section "Modify XML content setting up the right parameters."
I don't know how your message result will be used, but if you use a send port to send the result somewhere, but you can create a simple FILE send port to store your message instance.
I have normal receive port using a WCF-Adapter for oracle that uses a polling query. Now the problem is that the receive port not only needs to run once the polling query has a hit, but also once per day, regardless of the polling-statement.
Is there a way to make it possible without creating the entire process again?
The cleanest way will be to use an additional receive location. So you will end up with one receive port that contains two receive locations, one for each query.
In the past I have done this with the WCF adapter when polling SQL Server. The use of two locations did require duplicating the schema, unfortunately, to account for the different namespaces. You will probably need two different (and essentially identical) schemas as well.
WCF-SQL polling locations require distinct InboundId values while WCF Oracle polling (as you have noted in the comments) requires different a PollingId for each receive location.
The ESB toolkit includes pipeline components to remove and add namespaces, if you need additional downstream applications work with only a single schema on the messages coming from both locations and/or do not also want to duplicate a BizTalk map.
Change your polling statement so that it has an OR CURRENT_TIME() BETWEEN ....
That way it will trigger at the time you want.
I am not sure if I ask the right question, but this is the scenario I am trying to run:
Multiple files (XML and a few related files, "attachments") have to get into BizTalk as a single message. I have looked into existing adapters, and don't see that done with existing once. To be more accurate, files are taken from file system. Files are not found at the same time, but arrive one at a time, when order is not ensured. XML (content) file is the one that knows what attachments it has to have (what other files).
We are looking into BizTalk 2009 and I was wondering would be that responsibility of a custom Adaptor, or something else. And were I could look for samples.
Thanks.
It is probably possible to do what you want using a custom adapter, though I'd recommend against it. You can achieve what you require using orchestration.
What you are looking for is likey a convoy, or at the least some use of correlation.
In BizTalk a convoy is a messaging pattern (as opposed a BizTalk feature) that allows groups of messages to be processed by a single orchestration.
You essentially use correlation on a receive port to group messages together in either a parallel (what you probably want) or sequential fashion.
There is an article [here](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms942189(BTS.10\).aspx) by Stephen W. Thomas about convoys (it is for BT 2004 but the concepts still hold) and there is a lot of additional information on the web and in books (Professional BizTalk server 2006 has a subsection on them)
Without more details on your scenario it is hard to know exactly how the convoy would be built but below are two approaches to look at (also, I've not had a chance to properly use BT2009 so there may be extended support for correlation scenarios that help you out).
Flexible Correlation
If you don't know anything about the files listed in the context XML you will probably need a pattern like the one described by Charles Young in this post.
Non-uniform sequential convoy
If you do have a little bit of info before hand one way might be as follows (basically a Non-uniform sequential convoy):
This makes the assumption that there is some way of linking all the files together so you can correlate them.
Create a single orchestration that subscribes to you inbound receive port (which contains the file receive location).
This orchestration will have a single activation receive shape that is set up for your content file.
Once the orchestration is started by a content file a second correlated receive shape starts picking up the messages that match that content file. (this second receive could possible be in a loop to allow for variable numbers of files)
You then pack them all together into a single outbound file of your design and send them out once the full number of files has been received.
Seems to me a better approach would be to implement the above requirements with a combination of a custom pipeline component and/or a custom adapter. I assume you do not really need to manipulate the incoming files - except for the content XML file - or that you couldn't since they are in binary format. This calls for a custom pipeline component.
What you can do is develop a custom BizTalk adapter to interact with the file system and to implement the listening and looping logic. Next you can develop a custom pipeline component to create a single BizTalk message perhaps with base64 data type in it for binary data. Additionally you could also promote messages right in this component to enable orchestration subscriptions.
Orchestrations are more suited for implementing business work-flow scenarios where the messages are already in XML format. This do not appear to be the case. In any case I think at the very least a custom pipeline component would be needed.
David's answer is the correct answer.
Even in cases where you don't know absolutely nothing about the contents of the expected attachments, surely you know their names and locations. Therefore you can use the Flexible Correlation linked to in david's answer like this:
The key to the solution is to correlate on the builtin BTS.ReceivedFileName property.
First, create a custom receive pipeline, with a custom pipeline component that promotes the BTS.ReceivedFileName context property of the received messages. This simple custom component is fairly easy to write but you can make it straightforward by using third-party frameworks such as, (shameless plug, here) my PipelineComponentBase class or the excellent BizTalk Server Pipeline Component Wizard.
Now for the easy part:
Attachments are received in a specific location, designated by its path on the filesystem.
Create a receive location that listens to an alternate location, used only to control when files are actually swallowed by BizTalk.
In your orchestration, create a correlation type with the BTS.ReceivedFileName property and a correlation set base on this correlation type.
When you want to receive binary attachments, send a dummy message with the BTS.ReceivedFileName context property set to the filename of the binary attachment but with the path matching the alternate location ; the one used by the receive location. Initialize the correlation on the send shape.
Use an expression shape to copy the binary file from its original location to the one used by the receive location.
Finally, use a receive shape bound to the receive port that contains the receive location whose custom receive pipeline will promote the BTS.ReceivedFileName property.
Notice that you actually need to send a message in order to initialize the correlation. It does not matter what message you send actually. What I'd do is send the message through a send pipeline that contains an empty pipeline component. That is a pipeline component that reads the message but return null (so that the message vanishes into thin air before it reaches the adapter). A more elaborate solution would be to use a null adapter. That is an adapter that reads the message but does not do anything about it.
These two solutions avoid having many files accumulate in a temporary location somewhere, just for the sake of initializing a correlation!