BizTalk 2013R2 - WCF SOAP Adapter without orchestration - biztalk

Is it possible to expose a SOAP endpoint via BizTalk that calls another SOAP service without using orchestrations but just maps?
The current solution where orchestrations are being used is very slow (orchestration overhead is greater than 1,5 seconds) and performance gets even worse when it comes to high concurrency. I require a solution for low latency.

While not 100% sure for a SOAP endpoint, I have done this for WCF-BasicHttp, but cannot think of a reason why it would not be possible for SOAP. Various properties get promoted to the message context that would allow you to route a message to a send port, like the SOAP action, the receive port name, etc. Configuring a send port to subscribe to the relevant messages should be trivial. The mapping from the inbound-request to the outbound-request can happen on either the receive port or the send port.
In the case of using a solicit-response send port, the response message coming back would automatically be subscribed to by the originating receive port, assuming it is also two-way. Again, the mapping from the inbound-response to the outbound-response can happen on either the send port or the receive port.

Related

Request-reply with more clients and one server

How does Rebus ensure that a requester gets the response destined for the requester from the server?
The context is a setup with multiple clients, one backend server and two azure servicebus queues one for the client side and one for the server side. One client's response must not be received by another client.
My concern is that Rebus doesn't support sessions on azure service bus.
How does Rebus ensure that a requester gets the response destined for the requester from the server?
Rebus replies back to the queue specified with the rbs2-return-address header in the request, so if you have multiple instances consuming messages from that queue, then the reply will likely not be received by the original sender.
That's pretty much how it works, so it's important that all Rebus instances that consume messages from the same queue have the same capabilities. This implies that e.g. keeping in-mem, non-distributed state in a process that may receive replies from requests sent by other Rebus instance is a no-go.
If you describe the problem you're trying to solve, then maybe I can give you some inspiration on how to solve it.

AMQP, RabbitMQ Push API how works?

I'm trying to get a deep understand how works the Push API communication between the client and the RabbitMQ server.
As I know - but correct me in case - the client open a TCP connenction to the broker (RabbitMQ) and keep this connenction alive until the client decision to close it. But during this connection the client can get messages immediately.
My question is, during this connection, do the client monitor the Broker to ask him for messages, or when the Broker forward a message to the Queue, where the client subscribed, just take that connencion and push the data to the client?
first case: client monitor the broker for messages
last case: client don't need to monitor the broker, broker just push the data
or other?
There are two options to receive messages
The client registers a consumer callback (basicConsume) on the channel; the broker then "pushes" messages to the consumer.
The client sends the broker a basicGet and receives one message (if present).
The first use case is the most common.
Since you tagged the question with spring-amqp I assume you are interested in Spring. For the first case, Spring AMQP has a listener container (and #RabbitListener annotation); for the second case, one of the RabbitTemplate receive operations can be used.
I suggest you look at the tutorials to get a basic understanding. They cover several languages including pure java and Spring AMQP.
You can also look at the Spring AMQP Reference Manual.

how does ASP.net "HttpResponse.IsClientConnected" work?

if HTTP is connection-less, how does ASP.net response property, HttpResponse.IsClientConnected detect client is connected or not?
HTTP is not "connection-less" - you still need a connection to receive data from the server; more correctly, HTTP is stateless. Applications running on-top of HTTP will most likely actually be stateful, but HTTP itself is not.
"Connectionless" can also refer to a system using UDP as the transport instead of TCP. HTTP primarily runs over TCP and pretty much every real webserver expects, and returns, TCP messages instead of UDP. You might see HTTP-like traffic in UDP-based protocols like UPnP, but because you want your webpage to be delivered reliably, TCP will always be used instead of UDP.
As for IsClientConnected, when you access that property it calls into the current HttpWorkerRequest which is an abstract class implemented by the current host environment.
IIS7+ implements it such that if it previously received a TCP disconnect message (that sets a field) the method would now return false.
The ISAPI implementation (IIS 6) instead calls into a function within IIS that informs the caller if the TCP client on the current request/response context is still connected, though presumably it works on the same basis: when the webserver receives a TCP timeout, disconnect or connection-reset message it sets a flag and lets execution continue instead of terminating the response-generator thread.
Here's the relevant source code:
HttpResponse.IsClientConnected: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#System.Web/HttpResponse.cs,80335a4fb70ac25f
IIS7WorkerRequest.IsClientConnected: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#System.Web/Hosting/IIS7WorkerRequest.cs,1aed87249b1e3ac9
ISAPIWorkerRequest.IsClientConnected: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#System.Web/Hosting/ISAPIWorkerRequest.cs,f3e25666672e90e8
It all starts with an HTTP request. Inside it, you can, for example, spawn worker threads, that can outlive the request itself. Here is where IsClientConnected comes in handy, so that the worker thread knows that the client has already received the response and disconnected or not.

Rebus HTTP gateway and MSMQ health state

Let's say we have
Client node with HTTP gateway outbound service
Server node with HTTP gateway inbound service
I consider situation where MSMQ itself stops from some reason on the client node. In current implementation Rebus HTTP gateway will catch the exception.
What do you think about idea that instead of just catching, the MessageQueueException exception could be also sent to server node and put on error queue? (name of error queue could be gathered from headers)
So without additional infrastructure server would know that client has a problem so someone could react.
UPDATE:
I guessed problems described in the answer would be raised. I should have explained my scenario deeper :) Sorry about it. Here it is:
I'm going to modify HTTP gateway in the way that InboundService would be able to do both - Send and Receive messages. So the OutboundService would be the only one who initiate the connection(periodically e.g. once per 5 minutes) in order to get new messages from server and send its messages to server. That is because client node is not considered as a server but as a one of many clients which are behind the NAT.
Indeed, server itself is not interested in client health but I though that instead of creating separate alerting service on client side which would use HTTP gateway HTTP gateway code, the HTTP gateway itelf could do this since it's quite in business of HTTP gateway to have both sides running.
What if the client can't reach the server at all?
Since MSMQ would be dead I thought about using in-process standalone persistent queue object like that http://ayende.com/blog/4540/building-a-managed-persistent-transactional-queue
(just an example implementation, I'm not sure what kind of license it has)
to aggregate exceptions on client side until server is reachable.
And how often will the client notify the server that is has experienced an error?
I'm not sure about that part - I thought it could be related to scheduled time of message synchronization like once per 5 minutes but what in case there would be no scheduled time just like in current implementation (while(true) loop)? Maybe it could be just set by config?
I like to have a consistent strategy about handling errors which usually involves plain old NLog logging
Since client nodes will be in the Internet behind the NAT standard monitoring techniques won't work. I thought about using queue as NLog transport but since MSMQ would be dead it wouldn't work.
I also thought about using HTTP as NLog transport but on the server side it would require queue (not really, but I would like to store it in queue) so we are back to sbus and HTTP gateway...that kind of NLog transport would be de facto clone of HTTP gateway.
UPDATE2: HTTP as NLog transport (by transport I mean target) would also require client side queue like I described in "What if the client can't reach the server at all?" section. It would be clone of HTTP gateway embedded into NLog. Madness :)
All the thing is that client is unreliable so I want to have all the information about client on the server side and log it in there.
UPDATE3
Alternative solution could be creating separate service, which would however be part of HTTP gateway (e.g. OutboundAlertService). Then three goals would be fulfilled:
shared sending loop code
no additional server infrastructure required
no negative impact on OutboundService (no complexity of adding in-process queue to it)
It wouldn't take exceptions from OutboundService but instead it would check MSMQ perodically itself.
Yet other alternative solution would be simply using other than MSMQ queue as NLog target but that's ugly overkill.
Regarding your scenario, my initial thought is that it should never be the server's problem that a client has a problem, so I probably wouldn't send a message to the server when the client fails.
As I see it, there would be multiple problems/obstacles/challenges with that approach because, e.g. what if the client can't reach the server at all? And how often will the client notify the server that is has experienced an error?
Of course I don't know the details of your setup, so it's hard to give specific advice, but in general I like to have a consistent strategy about handling errors which usually involves plain old NLog logging and configuring WARN and ERROR levels to go the Windows Event Log.
This allows for setting up various tools (like e.g. Service Center Operations Manager or similar) to monitor all of your machines' event logs to raise error flags when someting goes wrong.
I hope I've said something you can use :)
UPDATE
After thinking about it some more, I think I'm beginning to understand your problem, and I think that I would prefer a solution where the client lets the HTTP listener in the other end know that it's having a problem, and then the HTTP listener in the other end could (maybe?) log that as an error.
Another option is that the HTTP listener in the other end could have an event, ReceivedClientError or something, that one could attach to and then do whatever is right in the given situation.
In your case, you might put a message in an error queue. I would just avoid putting anything in the error queue as a general solution because I think it confuses the purpose of the error queue - the "thing" in the error queue wouldn't be a message, and as such it would not be retryable etc.

How to subscribe to messages created in a BizTalk orchestration?

I have an orchestration that takes a message. The target namespace is "http://microsoft.com/HealthCare/HL7/2X" and the root element is "ORU_R01_23_GLO_DEF"
In the orchestration, I map the message to an intermediate message type in a construct shape. The target namespace is "http://mycompany.com/myapplication" and the root element is "MyMessage". The "MyMessage" message is then further mapped and then sent to a web service using a logical send port in the orchestration. A WCF send port is then bound to the orchestration and everything works fine. Everything works as expected.
Without altering the orchestration, I want to create a send port that subscribes to the intermediate "MyMessage" message and writes it to a file. To do this, I have created a send port with a filter of BTS.MessageType = http://mycompany.com/myapplication#MyMessage.
Even though messages are flowing through the orchestration, my send port isn't picking up the message. Is this the incorrect filter to use?
Are you trying to subscribe to the 'MyMessage' message, or the same message that is sent to the logical Send Port bound to the physical WCF Send Port?
You have stated that:
The "MyMessage" message is then further mapped and then sent to a web service using a logical send port in the orchestration. A WCF send port is then bound to the orchestration and everything works fine.
Message not Published to MsgBox
From what you have described, I would suggest that you do not have a Send Shape/Logical Send Port combination in your orchestration for the 'MyMessage' message, which is why you can't manually subscribe to this message type in a Send Port filter. The fact that you have not mentioned a 'Failed Routing Report' message further suggests that this is the case - this message type is generated when no subscriotion can be found for a message that is to be published to the MsgBox.
Capture a Message's 'MessageType'
If however you need to capture a copy of the message your are sending over the WCF Send Port, you will need to determine its MessageType and use that in your second Send Port subscription that writes the message out to file.
If you are unsure as to what MessageType to use, there is a simple trick to determine this information:
Stop (not Unenlist) the WCF Send Port
Send a message through your orchestration as normal - the message will be marked as 'Suspended Resumable' in the BizTalk Admin Console on the WCF Send Port.
Open the message in the BizTalk Admin Console and view its 'Message Context'; in the Message Context you will see its 'MessageType' property which you can then use to understand which subscription filter to use.
Start the WCF Send Port to flush the message.
Alternatively, if you don't want to change your orchestration, you could try archiving your message as it passes through the Send Pipeline in the (original) WCF Send Port - either write your own archiving component or use an existing commercial component. By using an archiving component in this manner, you will save yourself the expense of an extra subscription and the associated Send Port maintenance.
Update:
It sounds very much like the OP is not sending the intermediate message to the Message Box from their Orchestration (see comments). Message subscription will only work when a message is published to the Message Box - in this case, the message in question ('Message B') is an intermediate message that only lives within the context & lifetime of the orchestration. The OP needs to Send the message to a Direct Bound port within the Orchestration to allow the message to be subscribed to via a Send Port.
Verify the pipelines of the Send Port. Should by XML, not Passthrougth.

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