This post was originally published here

This blog will describe how we can publish a message using Biztalk server and the Apache ActiveMQ Rest API.  In previous blog I wrote about consuming a message from a AMQ and in this article show how to do it the other way.

To begin with we tried to use a BizTalk WCF-WebHTTP adapter to POST a message to the AMQ  with a request URL like http://servername:8161/api/message/MISC.MAX.DATA?type=queue&clientId=misc_data_biztalk&message_type=7222&message_version=2. We were pleased to see the message added to the queue with the correct properties. Unfortunately we got a transmission failure like “System.ServiceModel.ProtocolException: An HTTP Content-Type header is required for SOAP messaging and none was found” in the BizTalk group hub even though the message was added to the queue successfully. If we tried the request using fiddler it showed that the response does not contain a Content-Type in the header as well.

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Getting a transmission failure each time BizTalk posts a message is not acceptable and we searched for a solution. We created a custom behaviour to add this a Content type to the header of the response but the WCF-WebHTTP adapter transmission failure occurs before the message gets to that point. Next we tried to configure the AMQ to add a content type but could not find the correct “config” to edit.

Finally we decided to choose BizTalk HTTP adapter instead of the WCF-WebHTTP adapter to POST the message to the AMQ. The HTTP adapter is a very old adapter and I reasoned that it might not be as picky about what is in the header of the response. It was pleasing to find that the HTTP adapter did  POST a message to the AMQ without a transmission failure. This is a good example of where the HTTP adapter can do something that the modern WCF-WebHTTP adapter cannot do. Thanks to Deepa Kamalanathan for proving all this.

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In summary we have now shown that you can consume messages from a Apache AMQ with the BizTalk WebHTTP adapter and that you can publish messages to the AMQ with the HTTP adapter. One question remains and that is what throughput can be achieved using these adapters.