This post was originally published here
Recently my team and I developed and released several tools that extend the out-of-box capabilities of BizTalk Server 2016 for developer and administration teams to be more productive, saving times in some simple but time-consuming tasks that should d supposed to be. One of these tools was BizTalk Bindings Exporter Tool.
Because many clients still are using BizTalk Server 2013 R2, and because I had received some requests from the community, I will be releasing these tools for BizTalk Server 2013 R2 also. And today, we will stat with the BizTalk Bindings Exporter Tool
BizTalk Bindings Exporter Tool
BizTalk Binding Exporter Tool is a simple tool that will suppress the absence of advanced binding file generation capabilities in the BizTalk Server Administration Console, allowing you to generate and export a binding file from BizTalk Applications in an intuitive and easy way.
Exporting a BizTalk Server Application binding is, at first sight, a quick and straightforward task that can be done using the BizTalk Server Administration Console:
- Click Start, click All Programs, click Microsoft BizTalk Server 20xx, and then click BizTalk Server Administration
- In the console tree, expand BizTalk Server Administration, expand the BizTalk Group, and then expand Applications
- Right-click the application whose bindings you want to export, point to Export, and then click Bindings…
- On the Export Bindings page, in Export to file, type the absolute path of the .xml file to which to export the bindings
- Ensure that Export all bindings from the current application option is selected, and then click OK
But even in simple tasks, we may encounter challenges that require us to perform some monotonous and boring manual operations that consume some of our precious time and are always subject to failures. Because out-of-the-box BizTalk Administration Console doesn’t allow you to:
- Export a Binding file of a specif Receive Port or list of Receive Ports;
- Export a Binding file of a specif Send Port or list of Send Ports;
- Export a Binding file of a specif Assembly or list of Assemblies;
And these are just a few scenarios. You can only fully Export the binding files of an entire application, which will lead you to sometimes extensive and fallible manual work to clean the binding files.
Usually, the binding exportation starts in development. Still, we also need to generate the same bindings for other environments like production, and for that, we usually need to open the binding file and replace/fix the differences for each different environment… which usually is a tedious operation. What we need to replace is mainly:
- the URI’s: it should be fixed, but it is not mandatory. If you know what you are doing, you can fix them directly on the environment after you import the Binding.
- the host instances: not mandatory, if you have the same host and host instances names across all your different environments (as best practices will tell you to do).
- the NT Group Name associated in the Services (Orchestrations): according to securities best practices you shouldn’t use the same BizTalk Groups in different environments, so in this case, if you follow these best practices, you need to change these parameters in your binding file.
Normally, everyone changes the URI’s but neglecting the other parameters may be causing problems during the Binding import.
Once again, this tool will extend default BizTalk Server capabilities transforming the tedious and sometimes complicate binding generation a little simple and easy.
You just need to specify the connection string to the BizTalk Management database (BizTalkMgmtDb)
And this tool allows you to generate and export binding files with the following capabilities:
- Export binding(s) file(s) for an entire Application or a list of Applications;
- Export binding(s) file(s) from a specify Assembly or list of Assemblies;
- Export binding(s) file(s) from a Receive Port or list of Receive Ports;
- Export binding(s) file(s) from a Send Port or list of Send Ports;
- Or Generate different binding files for each environment if you create an Excel File with the mapping for each environment ;
Credits also to my team member at DevScope, Pedro Almeida that collaborated in the development of this tool.
Download
You can download BizTalk Bindings Exporter Tool from:
BizTalk Bindings Exporter Tool
GitHub
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