One of our Biztalk customers asks us automatically resend failed and suspended messages every 5 hours.
And problem is that developed orchestrations intensively uses Suspend shape so as far as I understand
messages became suspended immediately without standard Biztalk retrial.
I'm going to write simple app that will resume suspended messages via WMI Biztalk object .
Is this a good approach?
Does anybody has such application or did you find another resolution for this problem ?
Replace the suspend shape in the Orchestration with a delay shape configured to 5 hours.
Another options is to set the retry interval to 300 minutes and multiple retries on the send port.
Related
We have an upcoming deploy for a system that processes a lot of messages through BizTalk. Since those messages are cumulative updates they need to be queued up during the deployment outage then processed in order when the deploy is finished. Since there may be a large number of them it’s difficult to do this manually.
One possible solution is to leave the send port stopped and let the messages suspend. We can then resume them in order when the deployment is completed.
Is it possible to run a SQL script (or a tool) against the BizTalk messagebox database that will resume suspended messages, for a specific port, in order of receipt?
If you have an ordered requirement (you either do or don't), then the Send Port should be marked for Ordered Delivery.
If so, then when you Start a Stopped Send Port, the messages will be processed in the same order they were submitted.
If you stop the port (but leave it subscribed) and start it again afterwards it should resume the message itself, or if not it is simple enough to go into the Administration Console and batch resume them.
However if the response messages of the send port are subscribed too by running Orchestrations you will not be able to un-deploy the Orchestrations until they have all completed, so stopping the send port would not work in this scenario.
Sometimes one option is if the initiating port is a one way receive, is to stop the receive location and let everything complete. You can then stop the application and redeploy and restart it and the send port will pick up all the waiting message to process.
If the above is not possible you may want to look at doing a side by side deployment where you increment the version numbers of all the assemblies in the solution so you can have both versions deployed at the same time and you can then allow the old version to finish running but have the new version processing any new messages.
The better option is to send messages to msmq, usually there is no extra coding required for this. You can just route messages to msmq using MSMQ adapter and then after deployment receive them in order as MSMQ adapter allows to receive in order. Just make sure you do a small test in yr QA environment before doing it in production.
First of all, I don't know if this is the right place for this kind of question. Please tell me if it is not.
For a demo of a monitoring application. I want to force some sendports
and orchestrations to get an instance with suspended and dehydrated
messages
How can I do this in BizTalk 2013?
To get a suspended message:
Just create a receive port and a receive location without a send port that matches the subscription. This will create 2 suspended messages: your actual message and a routing failure.
To get a dehydrated orchestration, create an orchestration with a delay shape that waits for example 1 hour. It will not stay active, instead it will dehydrate.
Hope this helps!
Pieter
In order to overcome the (apparent) 4 minute idle connection timeout on the Azure load balancer, it seems necessary to send some data down the pipe to the client every now and again to keep the connection from being regarded as idle.
Our controller is set up as an AsyncController, and it fires several different asynchronous methods on other objects, all of which are set up to use IO Completion Ports. Thus, we return from our method immediately, and when the completion packet is processed, IIS hooks back up to the original request so that we can render our View.
Is there any way to periodically send a few bytes down the wire in this case? In a "classic" situation, we could have executed the method and then just spun while we waited, sending data every few seconds until the asynchronous method was complete. But, in this situation, the IIS thread is freed to go do other business, and we hook back up to it in our completion callback. What to do? Is this possible?
While your particular case concerns Windows Azure specific (the 4 minute timeout of LBs), the question is pure IIS / ASP.NET workwise. Anyway, I don't think it is possible to send "ping-backs" to the client while in AsyncController/AsyncPage. This is the whole idea of the AsyncPages/Controllers. The IIS leaves the socket aside having the thread serving other requests. And gets back only when you got the OutstandingOperations to zero with AsyncManager.OutstandingOperations.Decrement(); Only then the control is given back to send final response to the client. And once you are the point of sending response, there is no turning back.
I would rather argue for the architectural approach of why you thing someone would wait 4 minutes to get a response (even with a good animated "please wait")? A lot of things may happen during this time. From browser crash, through internet disruption to total power loss/disruption at client. If you are doing real Azure, why not just send tasks for a Worker Role via a Queue (Azure Storage Queues or Service Bus Queues). The other option that stays in front of you for so long running tasks is to use SingalR and fully AJAXed solution. Where you communicate via SignalR the status of the long running operation.
UPDATE 1 due to comments
In addition to the approach suggested by #knightpfhor this can be also achieved with a Queues. Requestor creates a task with some Unique ID and sends it to "Task submission queue". Then "listens" (or polls at regular/irregular intervals) a "Task completion" queue for a message with given Task ID.
In any way I don't see a reason for keeping client connected for the whole duration of the long running task. There are number of ways to decouple such communication.
Background:
We make use of a lot of aggregation, singleton and multiton orchestrations, similar to Seroter's Round Robin technique described here (BizTalk 2009).
All of the these orchestration types have fairly arbitrary exit or continuation points (for aggregations), usually defined by a timer - i.e. if an Orch hasn't received any more messages within X minutes then proceed with the batching, and if after Y more minutes have elapsed and no more messages then quit. (We also exit our Single / N-Tons due to concerns about degraded performance after large numbers of messages are subscribed to the singleton over a period).
As much as we've tried to mitigate against Zombies e.g. by Starting any continuation processing in an asynch refactored orchestration, there is always a point of weakness where a 'well' timed message could cause a zombie. (i.e. receiving more incoming messages correlated to the 'already completed' shapes of an orchestration),
If a message causes a zombie on one of the subscriptions, the message does not appear to be propogated to OTHER subscribers either (i.e. orchs totally decoupled from the 'zombie causing' orchestration), i.e. the zombie-causing message is not processed.
Question
So I would be very interested in seeing if anyone has another way, programmatically or otherwise, to explicitly remove a correlated subscription from a running orchestration once the orchestration has 'progressed' beyond the point where it is interested in this correlated message. (this new message would then would typically start a new orchestration with its own correlations etc)
At this point we would consider even a hack solution such as a reflected BizTalk API call or direct SQL delete against the MsgBoxDB.
No you can't explicitly remove the subscription in an Orchestration.
The subscription will be removed as the Orchestration is tearing itself down, but a message arriving at that exact instance will be routed to the Orchestration but the Orchestration will end without processing it, and that's your Zombie.
Microsoft Article about Zombies http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203853.aspx
I once also had to have an receive, debatch, aggregate, send pattern. Receiving enveloped messages from multiple senders, debatching them, aggregating by intended recipient (based on two rules, number of messages or time delay, whichever occurred first).
This scenario was ripe for Zombies and when I read about them I designed it so it would not occur. This was for BizTalk 2004
I debatched the messages, and inserted them into a database. I had a stored procedure that was polled by a receive port that would work out if there was a batch to send in if there was it would trigger of an Orcherstration that would take that message and route it dynamically.
Since neither Orchestrations had to wait for a another message they could end gracefully and there would be no Zombies.
How can I resume a dehydrated orchestration ?
the orchestration in question should have been retrieving messages from a MSMQ queue
but the userid permission wasn't set on the queue, so the BizTalk box wasn't able to read from the queue
Corrected the permissions, but the only options are teminate and suspend ?
If the orchestration attempted to start and failed on the MSMQ receive, it's essentially hung and has not removed a message from the queue. I'd terminate it. The orchestration should clear and pickup the new messages. Does your orchestration implement a singleton pattern or are you using ordered delivery on the receive? This makes things a little more complicated.
Shouldn't you be restarting the biztalk service instance for MSMQ?
Dehydrated means the orchestration is still waiting for something. I guess in your case, you must be waiting for a corelated message from MQ. If you restart receive host service instance, it will try to reconnect all connections (MSMQ, SQL, etc that managed by the service instance). Then all messages will be flow through to orchestrations.
update 1:
Check the relevant receive location. Maybe it got disabled by biztalk due to the permission problem. You will have to enable it manually.
update 0:
Your don't have to resume dehydrated orchestration. It's not the orchestration that read from the queue, but the msmq adapter. When a msmq message arrive the receive location will route it into the message box. If the said orchestration have a subscription ( receive port ) that match the msmq message then it will be resumed by the biztalk engine.
Can you suspend, then resume?
It's been a couple years since I did BizTalk. Quirks like this were annoying. Even worse when it's 250k dehydrated and you need to script to restart them. ugh
I feel for you.
BizTalk's ability to resume depends on the place and way it failed, and whether it can replay any part of the operatio; in most cases, when failing in an orchestration, some coding pattern need to be used to allow it to resume.