All posts by : ErwinAI - Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

1 of 6 | BizTalk Server 2006 R2 - BizTalk RFID - Microsoft are working on BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Remarkable news was the announcement of a specialist application for RFID, based on BizTalk. The product is called BizTalk RFID, and is included on the installation media of BizTalk Server 2006 R2.   Now, what is this?   In RFID-terms, I think BizTalk RFID is best described as "edgeware". It is meant to sit close to RFID-hardware and related things like printers, actuators and signal lights. This is the RFID-equipment on the shop floor. BizTalk Server 2006 can be used for back-end side integrayon of things.   Traditional problems with end-to-end solutions including RFID hardware is the lack of standardization and the absence of device d......

2 of 6 | BizTalk 2004 - end of topic - Because I will change jobs per Januari 1st, I will be moving away from the BizTalk projects and operations. I will no longer blog about BizTalk. ...

3 of 6 | BizTalk 2004 - Parsing flat files with optional records - For a project, I have been setting up a schema using the flat file extension. The file to read looks like a modified Edifact message. This is what it looks like: PNA,H123 LIN,2,XYZ0001 RFF,REFNO01 IMD,C,CODE1, VALUE1 IMD,C,CODE2,VALUE2 IMD,C,CODE3, VALUE3 The schema was created so that it reflects the structure of the message. For reading flat files, a few things had to be changed: Add the flat file extension to the schema Set the tag-identifier for each record that can be in the flat file (note: some additional group nodes were added to allow for 'group repeat' Set the child delimiter character, type and order for all nodes in the schema  A good indication about the effects of......

4 of 6 | BizTalk 2004 - sending messages using SMTP - The SMTP adapter can be used to send messages to email addresses. By default, the SMTP adapter comes with few options: Note that BizTalk is no mail server. The SMTP adapter can connect to a mail server. So, to be able to send the mail out, you need a mail server as well. You can control the “subject“, “from” and “to“ fields of the mail in a static way by defining them in the send port. With the “from“-field contents, your mails server might have problems. Most mail servers do not accept mail relaying, which is sending mail on behalf of an address / domain that is not related to the mail server. Multiple email-addresses are possible in ......

5 of 6 | BizTalk 2004 - xpath rules! - Over the past 2 years, I have developed most of the functionality in BizTalk using maps. You'll spend the days dragging and dropping functoids, and changing their properties. BizTalk maps are not much more than a graphical layer on top of XSLT, with some convenient (database) functoids, and allowing for inline scripting. It has been pointed out that the BizTalk maps are stored (and executed) as highly inefficient XSLT "code". Personally, I am not in favor of coding XSLT myself, as an alternative to the BizTalk maps. It reminds me of writing assembler for 68000 processors: even though the toolbox is well-equipped, building something complex requires a considerable amount of bespoke spa......

6 of 6 | BizTalk 2004 - Serialization of send actions - An existing orchestration, that reads Siebel-messages from an MSMQC-queue, maps them, and posts them to a remote http-server had to be upgraded. Together with the upgrade, the performance had to be reconsidered, as the orchestration would be dealing with an increased number of messages. We did some stress tests and found out that it was easy to get the remote http server into trouble. For a test, we dropped ~20 or more message files in a directory on the file system. This directory is read by a test orchestration that posts the messages in an MSMQC-queue. As of that moment, the upgraded orchestration receives the messages out of the queue, processes them and posts them. Because we drop man......