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Showing posts from February, 2008

Custom Validation Rules Pattern

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I have not worked a lot with the Business Rule Engine (BRE) from BizTalk, but today I had to show a customer how it worked. I demoed a BRE solution, where a rule was applied to message taken by an sample orchestration (see picture below, click to enlarge). Then customer asked if BRE could be used to validate messages received from a third party by applying rules. I said that it was possible, but validation could also take place for instance in pipeline (schema validation). From that point we had a discussion how to implement validation of messages provided by third parties. In the end we came figured out the following pattern, implemented as a validation kind of orchestration (see picture below, click to enlarge). Message from a random third party is received. A new message with a similar schema is created. Both messages are presented to a call rules shape, where a policy will be applied. This policy contain rules like picture below, click to enlarge. This concept delivers a way to app

Upgrading BizTalk Server 2006 to R2

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T oday I upgraded a BizTalk Server 2006 Development Machine to BizTalk Server R2 for one of my customers. How one can do upgrade this upgrade? Well download installation and upgrade guides from Microsoft for starters. Then gather information about your system. System BizTalk Server 2006 Enterprise Edition is running on is Windows 2003 Server R2 standard edition with SP2, Intel Xeon 1.80 Ghz, 2.00 Gb RAM (Virtualized VMWare). Everything is configured from SSO to BAM Portal. In documentation provided by Microsoft one can find how to upgrade from and to which edition of BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Upgrade from Enterprise BizTalk Server 2006 Edition to BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Developer Edition is possible even though not supported! First thing to do is stop all host instances and following services: BizTalk Base EDI Service, Rule Engine Update Service, and World Wide Web Publishing Service. Next backup all databases, here is the complete list: SQL Server databases: master, MSDB BizTalk Server

Mass Copy Functiod Challenge

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Today my BizTalk buddy Wouter Crooy had a problem with mass copy functiod he used inside his orchestration with a certain mapping. His mapping worked on development machine and development server, but failed to do so in test environment. Development and test were not exactly to same (it missed some patches for msxml and so on). He made an effort to get them equal, but still it did not work. So it became finding a needle in a haystack to find out what the exact problem was since he could not get it working. So what now? I suggested to use inline script instead of mass copy to achieve to same manner of mapping (he wanted to mass copy a any element). One can use the Mass Copy functoid () to recursively copy all data in an input instance message, to arbitrary depth, that corresponds to a specified node in the source schema to the position in an output instance message that is specified by the output link. One can also use inline xslt like in case you like to mimic mass copy for any elemen

Experimenting with BizTalk and WCF: Operation Patterns Part I

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Last week Richard Seroter wrote an article for TopXML.com to provide depth on BizTalk and WCF integration. This article explains various operation patterns when BizTalk consumes a WCF service. He touches subjects like complex vs. simple types, one way vs. two way operations, (custom) fault contracts, and using the WCF-WSHttp and WCF-WSCustom BizTalk adapters. So I read the article and tried his scenario out. Setup Before I could do that I had to set a new virtual machine. I created a new virtual machine with Windows 2003 Server R2 SP2; 16 Gb Hard disk space, 1024 Mb RAM, uses dual core processor from host (my laptop). Updated the server with server update. Then I added a couple of server roles to the server: * Application Server Options with Frontpage Server Extensions and Enable ASP.NET both checked. And then IIS, COM+ remote transactions, DTC, Frontpage Server Extensions, Indexing and ASP.NET. be sure you have capture or mounted iso voor Windows 2003 Server R2 CD1 or DVD. * SharePoi