There are a lot of things I do not know about BizTalk. The list is getting shorter but here is something I found.
I was trying to verify a flow within a known environment. Everything else seemed to work apart from this one flow. A technician submitted files to a directory and the file was picked up. However it did not show up on any tracking; neither the basic BizTalk tracking nor our BAM-implementation noticed the file.
The files was picked up and I verified that the file was picked up by BizTalk. I could not submit the file myself as I did not have access to the path.
After a while I remembered to check to log on the other BizTalk node in the cluster and then it became clear. A simple warning said: “The FILE receive adapter deleted the empty file "\\Server\Share\testfile.txt" without performing any processing.” I have to admit that I did not know that. It is actually a “know issue”
What happens is that the file is picked up but as the technician just submitted files using the old Right-click + New the file is empty. BizTalk does not process empty streams as it were and the file is deleted without any trace in the tracking.
Here’s a tip
In some scenarios you might receive an empty file to start a flow within BizTalk. Perhaps some system is telling BizTalk “That data you’re so interested in is done”. Make sure that file contains some data. Perhaps just a repeat of the file name or the letter “M”.
Blog Post by: Mikael Sand