For the third consecutive year, BizTalk Innovation Day event will be conducted in several European cities. And like last year the tour will start with our major event that is back to London even bigger and better! 12 Integration MVP’s from across the world (USA, Canada, India, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and of course […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
Use Business Rule Engine to implement business logic that is modular, reusable and simple. It will allow you to operate on information contained in .NET objects, database tables and XML Documents. BRE also enables developers to create and maintain applications with minimal effort. The Business Rule Engine can be a good way of to modularize […]
The post BizTalk Server Tip #14: Use the Business Rule Engine to implement Business Logic appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.
Blog Post by: Ricardo Torre
When you call a REST Service in BizTalk 2013, there could be scenarios when an ID, or any other query variable, must be determined at runtime. To enable such scenarios, you specify variables for the HTTP Method URL Mapping. The variable maps normally to a promoted field in a message but there are some scenarios where you cannot use promoted properties.
In this sample I’m going to call a REST Service and update an Event for a specific Customer with BizTalk. To start the process I receive a CustomerEvent message with a Customer Id. Because the REST service expects a data message I have to transform it to the data message and post the data message to the REST service.
REST Service called by SoapUI
But also the Customer Id needs to be dynamically set in the URI at runtime. I can’t use property promotion to dynamically set the URI because I don’t have a customer_id field in the data message. So in this specific case I cannot use promoted properties.
To solve this I’m going to put the customer_id field from the CustomerEvent message in a custom context property because I don’t have the customer_id field anymore in the data message.
The following steps show how you can use variable mapping and context properties without using promoted properties.
| Generate schemas for the CustomerEvent- and the data message. |
| Create a Property schema. |
| In the Property Schema Base property you can specify if the property is a Message Data property or a Message Context property. |
| Create a BizTalk Map to transform the CustomerEvent message to the data message. |
| Create an Orchestration to execute the Map and set the custom context property in a Message Assignment shape. (The customer_id is a distinguished field and is not promoted.) |
|
Create a Send Port in the BizTalk Administration Console. Specify WCF-WebHttp for the Type option in the Transport section of the General tab. |
| Click in the Variable Mapping section on the ’Edit’ button to specify where the value for the variable ID must be picked from at runtime. Under the Variable column, the dialog box lists the variables that you defined for the URL Mapping. In the Property Name field you must specify the name of the property that provides the value to be associated to the variable. |
If you have to call a REST Service with BizTalk and the URI has to be dynamically set at runtime, you normally can use property promotion. However there are scenarios where you cannot use promoted properties and in such cases custom context properties are a really good alternative!
You can download the BizTalk sample with the source code here:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Using-Variable-Mapping-in-2d52d9ef
As I look at the calendar and see some important dates are quickly approaching, I thought I better put together a quick blog post to highlight some of the events that I will be speaking at in early March.
I will be using the same content at all events but am happy to talk offline about anything that you have seen in this blog or my presentation from Norway this past September.
The title of my session this time around is: Exposing Operational data to Mobile devices using Windows Azure and here is the session’s abstract:
In this session Kent will take a real world business scenario from the Power Generation industry. The scenario involves real time data collection, power generation commitments made to market stakeholders and current energy prices. A Power Generation company needs to monitor all of these data points to ensure it is maintaining its commitments to the marketplace. When things do not go as planned, there are often significant penalties at stake. Having real time visibility into these business measures and being notified when the business becomes non-compliant becomes extremely important.
Learn how Windows Azure and many of its building blocks (Azure Service Bus, Azure Mobile Services) and BizTalk Server 2013 can address these requirements and provide Operations people with real time visibility into the state of their business processes.
The first stop on the tour is London where I will be speaking at BizTalk360’s BizTalk Summit 2014. This is a 2 day paid conference event which has allowed BizTalk360 to bring in experts from all over the world to speak at this event. This includes speakers from Canada (me), my neighbor, the United States, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and India. These experts include many Integration MVPs and the product group from Microsoft.
There are still a few tickets available for this event so I would encourage you to act quickly to avoid being disappointed. This will easily be the biggest Microsoft Integration event in Europe this year with a lot of new content.
After the London event, Steef-Jan Wiggers and I will be jumping on a plane and will head to Stockhom to visit our good friend Johan Hedberg and the Swedish BizTalk Usergroup. This will be my third time speaking in Stockholm and 4th time speaking in Scandinavia. I really enjoy speaking in Stockholm and am very much looking forward to returning to Sweden. I just really hope that they don’t win the Gold Medal in Men’s Hockey at the Olympics otherwise I won’t hear the end of it.
I am also not aware of any Triathlons going on in Sweden at this time so I should be safe from participating in any adventure sports.
At this point an EventBrite is not available but watch the BizTalk Usergroup Sweden site or my twitter handle (@wearsy) for more details.
The 3rd and last stop on the tour is the Netherlands where I will be speaking at the Dutch BizTalk User Group. Steef-Jan Wiggers will also be speaking as will Ren%u00e9 Brauwers. This will be my second trip to the Netherlands but my first time speaking here. I am very much looking forward to coming back to the region to talk about integration with the community and sample Dutch Pancakes, Stroopwafels and perhaps a Heineken (or two).
The eventbrite is available here and there is no cost for this event.
See you in Europe!
Disclaimer: This summary blog post is written by extracting content from "The Forrester Wave: Hybrid Integration, Q1 2014" report Forrester conducted integration portfolio evaluations with more than 40 integration products in October 2013 and interviewed 14 vendors. Participation was tough, all participating vendors had to offer at least four of the following seven integration capabilities […]
The post The Forrester Wave™: Hybrid Integration, Q1 2014 – Microsoft represented BizTalk360 for BizTalk Server runtime management appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.
Blog Post by: Saravana Kumar
Using the standard configuration for monitoring suspended orchestrations with System Center Operations Manager isn’t that useful for BizTalk monitoring. Let’s take the orchestration monitoring to the next level.
Use Microsoft Clustering for adapters that required a single host instance running at a time like FTP or POP3 to avoid duplicate messages while providing high availability. Failure to implement this will result in either having to deal with duplicate messages or implementing manual processes for performing failover. Due to the nature of some protocols […]
The post BizTalk Server Tip #13: Cluster host instances with adapter like FTP or POP3 appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.
Blog Post by: Ricardo Torre
Collect performance counters on a regular basis and analyse them with PAL for the best performance insight of a BizTalk environment. Collect performance data during your utilization peak time and compare the results with a baseline to be able to plan for the right capacity in your system. Monitoring the performance of your BizTalk System […]
The post BizTalk Server Tip #12: Review the performance of your environment regularly appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.
Blog Post by: Ricardo Torre
Lock down your BizTalk system by using different security context when accessing sensitive information, you can achieve this by running your hosts and host instances with different Windows Groups and Users. Reducing the surface of attack with this approach will make your environment less prone to attacks. Security is a very important topic when integrating […]
The post BizTalk Server Tip #11: Create security boundaries appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.
Blog Post by: Ricardo Torre
When we configure Deployment Settings in Visual Studio projects, our database settings (“Configuration Database” and “Server”) and BizTalk Settings (“Application Name”) are only stored in a personal “*.btproj.user” file. By default these files are ignored in your check-ins, but that may not be the desired effect. We recommend that those settings are also stored in […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira