BizTalk General

Installing and Configuring PeopleSoft Adapter for BizTalk Server 2010

Vishal — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:00:00 GMT

Architecture of PeopleSoft Adapter:

The BizTalk PeopleSoft Adapter is based on the BizTalk Server Adapter Framework. More info: How the Adapter Is Designed: The Adapter Framework. The PeopleSoft adapter basically communicates with the PeopleSoft Component Interfaces via the PeopleSoft JOLT protocol (over TCP/IP). The adapter communicates with PeopleSoft system by receiving a XML message which is later encapsulated into a SOAP request using the PeopleSoft psjoa classes. With this connection we can get the metadata to call into the existing Component Interfaces and generate the API schemas and use them within BizTalk Server for mapping, orchestrations at design time and runtime. According to Microsoft, if you need to have PeopleSoft Enterprise to initiate the call to BizTalk Server, they recommend using the HTTP adapter. More info : Creating a PeopleSoft HTTP Host and Port

More detailed information on PeopleSoft Adapter Architecture can be found on MSDN.

Requirements for PeopleSoft Adapter:

BizTalk Server Enterprise Adapters installed and configured and of course BizTalk Server 2010 installed and configured.
Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.4.2 or later.
Access to the PeopleSoft Application Designer to deploy Component Interface. The PeopleSoft Application Designer does not have to be on the BizTalk server.

Installing BizTalk Server Enterprise Adapters:

Open the BizTalk Server 2010 setup and click Install Microsoft BizTalk Adapters.

Install Adapters packs for all the 4 Steps.

This concludes the installation the BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications. Don’t worry about the warning in Step1.

Configuring PeopleSoft Adapter for BizTalk Server:

Open BizTalk Server Administration Console –> Platform Settings –> Adapters –> Right Click –> New –> Adapter

In the new window, choose name as PeopleSoft and from the adapter dropdown choose PeopleSoft Enterprise. Click Apply –> OK and restart your Host Instances. Now you can see the PeopleSoft Adapter as the installed BizTalk Adapters.

This concludes the configuration of PeopleSoft adapter on the BizTalk side. Next is to create a Component Interface on the PeopleSoft side though which BizTalk PeopleSoft adapter can communicate.

Configuring a New Component Interface for PeopleSoft:

Environment

- PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.52

- PeopleSoft Enterprise HRMS 9.0

- Oracle Web Logic Server 10.3.4.0

- Tuxedo 10gR3

- JRockit JDK R28.1

Step1: Creating a New Component Interface:

Go to the Server where you have PeopleSoft Enterprise Application installed.
Go to Start –> All Programs –> PeopleSoft (can differ according to version you have installed) –> Application Designer. Log in with your PeopleSoft user ID.

On the File menu, click New. In the New dialog box, select Component Interface.

Click Select on the next window and it will show list of current CI. Select any Component Interface which does not have any keys. After you select the appropriate component, you see a message asking if you want the fields exposed in the selected component to become the default properties of the Component Interface.

Click Yes to confirm the Default Property Definitions or No if you don’t want any properties initially created.

On the File menu, click Save As. In File Name, enter GET_CI_INFO, and then click OK.

Right-click any method of your new Component Interfaces, and then click View PeopleCode. A new blank window will pop up.

Copy and paste the contents of <PeopleSoft installation directory>\PeopleSoft Enterprise\config\get_ci_info.pc into the window. Open the file in notepad and copy the contents of it.

On the File menu, click Save. You now have a new Component Interface.
Just to verify if you perfomed the steps correct. Close the Application Designer. Reopen Application Designer and Log in with your PeopleSoft user. Go to File –> Open –> Component Interface and browse to GET_CI_INFO and open it. You should see something similar as shown below.

Step2: Set the PeopleSoft Component Interface security:

In the below steps, the Permission lists, Roles and User Profile are just selected randomnly to display the steps. Please select the appropriate Permission List, Roles and User Profile according to your use and accessibility. Highly recommend setting up this security with a PeopleSoft Administrator person or a PeopleSoft expert.

Select PeopleTools, Security, Permissions & Roles, Permission Lists.

Click Search, select the relevant Permission List, and click the appropriate list hyperlink. The Permission List pane opens on the right.

Click the right arrow next to the Sign-on Times tab to display the Component Interfaces tab. Click the Component Interfaces tab.

Click the + button to add a new row to the Component Interfaces list.

Select the GET_CI_INFO component interface and click Edit.

Click Full Access (All) to set the methods to Full Access. Click OK.

Scroll down to the bottom of the Component Interfaces window and click Save.

Select PeopleTools, Security, Permissions & Roles, Roles. Click Search, select the relevant Role and click the appropriate list hyperlink.

The Role pane opens on the right. Click the Permission List tab.

Click the + button to add a new row to the Permission List.
Select the GET_CI_INFO Permission List.
Scroll down to the bottom of the Roles window and click Save. [Save as GET_CI_ROLE]

Select PeopleTools, Security, User Profiles, User Profiles.
Click Add New Value, type BizTalk into the text box, and click Add to display the General tab

Select a Symbolic ID in the drop-down box.
Type a Password and Confirm Password.
Choose an appropriate Navigator Homepage.
Choose an appropriate Process Profile.
Choose an appropriate Primary Permission List for the Primary field.
Choose an appropriate Row Security Permission List for the Row Security field.

Click the Roles tab.
Click the + button to add a new row to the Roles list.
Select the GET_CI_INFO Role.
Select the PeopleSoft User Role.
Select the Standard Non-Page Permissions Role.
Scroll down to the bottom of the User Profile window and click Save.

Step3: Testing the Component Interface:

Start PeopleSoft Application Designer. Click File, Open and select Definition = Component Interface.
Select GET_CI_INFO CI from the list of Component Interfaces.

After opening GET_CI_INFO, right-click anywhere in the right pane of your Component Interface definition and select Test Component Interface.

The Component Interface Tester dialog box appears.

GET_CI_INFO should not contain any keys. If keys are present, you need to return to Application Designer and remove them.

This concludes the set up of the GET_CI_INFO Component Interface needed to communicate with BizTalk Server.

In the next coming blog posts we will see how we can generate metadata with this GET_CI_INFO Component Interface.

Regards,

Vishal Mody

PS: Reference from MSDN article : Microsoft BizTalk Adapters for PeopleSoft

HERMES : A pub/sub infrastructure over HTTP. Good News - It’s an Open Source Technology

Vishal — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:54:27 GMT

Today we are glad to announce HERMES, an Open Source Infrastructure for publish subscribe messaging model based on MongoDB and RESTful Services.

This is 8^th release of an open source project from TellagoDevLabs on Codeplex. Hermes is months of hard work by us, including Silvio Massari, Jose Romaniello and Gustavo Machado.

Hermes is not BizTalk Server. BizTalk Server has pub-sub mechanism in its infrastructure but in very traditional way and it hasn’t provided a foundation that can be seamlessly used by any .NET application. BizTalk pushes the message to its subscribers. If the subscribers are down, BizTalk retries it with the retry configurations. Even after all the retries, it suspends the message. In Hermes model, it not only pushes the message to the subscriber but also the Subscriber can come and poll for the message. Though, Hermes is not a message broker. Hermes does not care about what message it has been sent to what subscriber. Also, all the transformation are taken care by the subscriber and this removes that responsibility of the messaging engine of Hermes. Solely, Pub/Sub.

Hermes is over HTTP so it can be used by any Platform which makes everything really easy. Mostly all the platforms today have capability to communicate over HTTP. Hermes is very light weight and it can run easily on premise. Check, how to setup Hermes on your machine. Also we are looking forward to test Hermes on “The Cloud”.

Hermes uses MongoDB to store its messages. MongoDB, which itself is ridiculously fast and hence, Hermes is very very fast. Using MongoDB, it made it extremely easy to store, partition and index high volumes of messages for a large number of topics and subscriptions. Hermes also has an Admin Portal where you can administer Topics, Groups, Publishers, Subscribers and some statistics. You can even push messages through this portal. We are currently working on enhancing this portal.

We also provide a Client Library for C#. Using this library, it becomes fairly simple to create Groups, Topics, Subscriptions etc. You can find a sample on how to use this library with the source code.

Licensing: Hermes is using BSD license. Completely Open Source.

You can check the Hermes documentation here. Read more about Hermes annoucement on Jesus Rodriguez blog post.

What’s Next:

Enhance the Administration Portal of Hermes.
Provide more sample applications using Hermes.
Enhance the REST API.
Build a JavaScript Client Library.
Hermes deployment on the “Cloud”. (AmazonEC2 and Windows Azure)
Explore new Messaging patterns.

Give it a try with Hermes and we are looking forward to hear feedback from you.

Thanks,

Vishal Mody

Biztalk receive location polling RESTful Service. (HTTP GET)

Vishal — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:55:04 GMT

Hi there,

Recently we had a requirement to integrate a RESTful Service with BizTalk Server. Well no biggie. You can use WCF – Custom Adapter and use webHTTP binding and add a webHttp Endpoint behavior. Wala. Easy to say, little bit tricky to do.

You can look at some of these post by my company folks Jesus Rodriguez, Adrian & Leandro and also nice one on MSDN. Well there are bunch of other posts out there.

That all is fine, but what if you want to have a polling receive location which needs to go and do an HTTP GET to a RESTful Service. Aahh!! That’s even more trickier. Bunch of you reading this post would have already thought about some or other way of doing it.

1. Create a basic windows service which runs at scheduled time and drops a message into BizTalk and Biztalk picks up, a RESTful send port subscribes to that message and do the regular RESTful call.

2. Have a SQL Task to drop a message and have a RESTful SendPort to do the regular RESTful call.

3. Many more way..

But what if we can have a Receive Port itself polling at regular interval and make the RESTful Service call? This eliminates the need of unnecessary windows service or the SQL Task or any other triggering process you think of. Cool right..!!

So I came across the BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter.

This is a task scheduling adapter which can execute a prescribed task at a configured time. It comes with few default scheduling tasks like XmlString, FileReader, HttpDownload. Also has few version of it out there which can work with almost all versions of BizTalk Server. Lot of people are using it without any issues.

How does it solve our scenario of invoking RESTful Service?

Well, I decided to write a custom Task for it which will be invoking the RESTful Service. I tried to make this component pretty generic so that anyone can use it but ofcourse, it also depends upon type of RESTful service you are invoking. Few might need authentication, keys etc. You can always extend it according to your needs. Anyways, below is how you can use it.

1. Download and install the BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter. Here is a blog post on how you can use the defaults Tasks which comes with it.

2. Download and Open the RESTServiceAdapterProvider Project in Visual Studio. Compile the code and GAC the assembly if it does not do it by itself.

3. Open BizTalk Server Admin Console and create a new Receive Port, Receive Location under your application.

4. In the receive location properties, Adapter type = Scheduler. This is the name you give to the BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter while configuring it. If you don’t see this make sure you go to the Platform Setting à Adapters à New Adapter and from the drop down select the Schedule Adapter and name it whatever you want. In my case, I named it as Scheduler.

5. Next click Configure next the Adapter Type. In the configuration window, type the name of Schedule Task you want to give. In this case “RESTfulScheduler”

6. Next click the Schedule tab on this window and specify the time you want this scheduler to run.

7. Next click the Task tab on the same window and under the Class, click Find Task and Click browse under Assembly Qualified Type Name and select the RESTServiceAdapterProvider.dll from the file location of the RESTServiceAdapterProvider project.

8. In the Assembly Qualified Type Name, select RESTProvider and click Select and its fully qualified name will appear at the bottom and click OK.

9. If you get Invalid Assembly class selected, make sure you Gac the RestProvider dll, close the BTS Admin Console, reopen it and restart the HostInstance and try again.

10. Next specify the URL, Content Type, WebMethod and click Apply, OK.

11. Once you are done configuring, you will see the URI as : schedule://TimeSpan/RESTfulScheduler

12. Next is according to your requirements for the message. You can have pipeline component doing bunch of stuff or have orchestration, schemas, maps, business rules for this message or have a send port subscribing to this message. Anything.

You can download the source code of the RESTfulAdapterProvider here

So, above you saw way of configuring a BizTalk Receive Location Polling a RESTful Service. Thanks for reading.

-Vishal Mody

WCF SQL Adapter not working after installing BizTalk 2006 R2 SP1

Vishal — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:27:10 GMT

Recently I was building a VM for a BizTalk 2006 R2 project. My VM configuration was :

Windows 2003 R2
SQL 2005 with SP4
Visual Studio 2005 with SP1
BizTalk Server 2006R2

I installed the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 update from the Windows Update. Life was good so far.

Next I got requirement to use WCF SQL adapter and there I went and started installing the pre-requisite for it.

1. WCF LOB Adapter SDK SP2

2. Microsoft BizTalk Adapter for SQL Server.

After that I went and tried to Add the Adapter metadata but then I did not see the WCF – SQL option itself. I was wondering what happened. I did some research and came across this blog post which told to change the BizTalk Version Number manually in the registry. I did that and reinstalled/repaired the packages like multiple times but in vain.

Finally I came across Microsoft’s this post which describes few issues which the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 update creates.

What’s the fix then??

Install the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 Cumulative Update.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

VISHAL MODY

Configure BizTalk Receive Location to accept any WCF Messages.

Vishal — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:30:54 GMT

Hi,

Shown below is one of the most easiest way to configure a BizTalk Receive Location which can receive any WCF Message based on the Binding type you provide in the configuration. This uses the WCF Custom WebService Host Factory.

Where you can use this type of configurations?

· Scenario where you need to send a WCF Message from .NET Code.

· BizTalk Unit Testing.

· Receive Locations which will be using ESB Toolkit receive locations.

· and Many more.

Anyways, below are the steps:

- Create a IIS Virtual Directory and name it with some relevant name, say “Testing”. (Make sure the AppPool identity you select has proper priviledges.)

- Create a blank .svc file in the physical location of the directory, say “ReceiveMsg.svc”

- Open up that svc file in note pad and copy the below markup stuff in it.

<%@ ServiceHost Language="c#" Factory="Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Runtime.CustomWebServiceHostFactory, Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Runtime, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" %>

- Next, open up BizTalk Admin Console and Create a Receive Port in whichever BizTalk App where you want the port to be.

- Create a Receive Location for that Receive Port.

- Select the Transport Type as WCF-CustomIsolated.

- Next configure the WCF-CustomIsolated type. For the URI type "/Testing/ReceiveMsg.svc".

- For the binding you can select any WCF binding, here for the example I choose basicHTTPBinding. You can also configure the security configuration for this binding but lets leave it default for the example. Make sure you configure your client which sends the message according to same binding configurations.

- Pipeline: You can have your own Custom Pipeline or use BizTalk default ones. Here, lets keep it PassThruReceive.

- That’s it. Your receive location is configured and now just enable it.Next go to IIS and browse the ReceiveMsg.svc. You should see the below screenshot.

There are bunch of blog posts where it shows how you can send message to Biztalk though custom .net code. You can refer my previous blog post in which I have shown how you can use netNamedPipeBinding. One of my collegue Uri Katsir has blog post where he shows about WSHttpBinding.

Thanks,

Vishal Mody

Webinar: BizTalk Governance using SO-Aware.

Vishal — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:22:51 GMT

Hi there everyone,

We have a Webinar coming up for BizTalk Governance using SO-Aware on Thursday, October 28th 2010 (2:00PM to 3:00PM EST). Like you guys might be knowing now that SO-Aware is a "WCF RESTful Registry solution" and its one of the attractive feature is Centralizing Configurations. This webinar will be showing you some of those features and also how you can use SO-Aware extensively with other BizTalk Solutions.

You can register/sign up here: http://tellagostudios.com/hottopics

Meanwhile you can read this blog post from Jesus Rodriguez in which he talks more about Simpliying BizTalk Adapter Configurations using SO-Aware.

Thanks and Happy BizSoAwaring...!!!

Vishal Mody

More BizTalk ESB Samples for SO-Aware ESB Resolver.

Vishal — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:19:04 GMT

Hi there folks,

I have created few more ESB Itineraries samples which uses the SO-Aware ESB Resolver for different kinds of scenarios. Scenarios like:

1. Two Way Itinerary :

Msg In -- Transform -- Route -- ReqestResponse WCF Svc (Registed in SoAware) -- Transform -- Route -- Destination WCF Service (Registered in SoAware).

2. One Way Routing:

Msg in -- Resolve Routing parameters -- WCF Service (Registered in SOAware)

Thanks and Happy SO-Awaring with ESB and BizTalk. ;-)

-Vishal Mody

New Version of BizTalk Data Services is out from Tellago Devlabs on CodePlex..!!

Vishal — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:43:30 GMT

We at Tellago, Inc. had recently open sourced first version of BizTalk Data Services by Jesus Rodriguez and ESB ToolKit 2.0 Extensions by Dwight Goins on Codeplex. The BizTalk Data Services was more about based on Querying, Browsing for BizTalk Artifacts via RESTful interface.

Today we have a new release for the BizTalk Data Services which is an extension of the earlier release. The new release v0.6 contains:

· IUpdatable

· Enabling and Disabling Receive Locations

· Starting and Stopping Send Ports

· Starting and Stopping Applications

· Starting, Stopping and Unenlisting orchestrations

· Starting, and Stopping Host Instances

· Resume, Suspend and Terminating Instances

· IQueryable for host instances

The newer release was the hard work of Tellago’s Architect Adrian Lopez ("the happy argentine"). Now I got to support Argentina for the World Cup 2010 or I am dead...!!! ;-) You can read more about the new release on his Blog here.

Keep checking folks. There's even more to come.

Thanks,

Vishal Mody

Configure EnableTransaction and IsolationLevel property in Business Rules for Dynamic Send Port

Vishal — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:19:53 GMT

Why do you want to add these properties to the BRE..??

There is a performance tradeoff when using WCF adapters with Dynamic Send Port. Below is a link for more info.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mdoctor/archive/2009/12/18/performance-tip-when-using-wcf-custom-with-dynamic-send-ports-and-custom-bindings-on-biztalk-server-2009.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

So if you are using ESB Toolkit 2.0 in your solution and you do not want to move towards static port then you can add the below line in your SetEndpointConfig value for BRE.

BindingType=xyzAdapterBinding&EnableTransaction=true&IsolationLevel=ReadCommited&BindingConfiguration=<bindingname=”xyzAdapterBinding" />

The IsolationLevel values can be:

Serializable
RepeatableRead
ReadCommited
ReadUncommited
Snapshot
Chaos

Below are few Business Rules Composer Screenshots:

Thanks,

Vishal Mody

Happy ESBing...!!!!!!

Send Message to BizTalk Receive Location with few lines of C# code through WCF-NetNamedPipe as Transport Type

Vishal — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:31:41 GMT

Hi there,

Today we will be doing a quick little test to send a XML message to BizTalk with few lines of code. I had a scenario in my solution in which I had a WCF LOB Outbound Adapter which was doing some work and later the same code had to submit message back to BizTalk. First solution I thought of was writing the message to a File Location and than a BizTalk Receive Location picks it up from there and processes it. But then came up with a different solution of using WCF netPipe and submitting it directly to BizTalk.

Anyways, I created a small Console App which just take a XML from a file location (which in my code was the WCF Outbound Adapter forming this XML message) and then send to BizTalk and there is a Send Port putting this message out to another file location. Below are the steps.

· Create a new Console Application.

· Add reference to the following assemblies

o System.Runtime.Serialization

o Sytem.ServiceModel

· Below is the piece of code which does the work.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.ServiceModel;

using System.ServiceModel.Channels;

using System.Xml;

using System.IO;

namespace TestConsole

{

public class SendBizTalk

{

[ServiceContract()]

private interface IBizTalkSubmission

{

[OperationContract(Action = "*", ReplyAction = "*")]

void Submit(Message msg);

}

static void Main(string[] args)

{

XmlTextReader xmlrdr = new XmlTextReader(@"C:\Test\In\Test.xml");

Message msg = Message.CreateMessage(MessageVersion.Default, "*", xmlrdr);

string uriLocationEsbOnRamp = "net.pipe://localhost/SendBizTalk";

NetNamedPipeBinding b = new NetNamedPipeBinding();

b.Security.Mode = NetNamedPipeSecurityMode.None;

EndpointAddress epa = new EndpointAddress(uriLocationEsbOnRamp);

IBizTalkSubmission proxy = ChannelFactory<IBizTalkSubmission>.CreateChannel(b, epa);

proxy.Submit(msg);

}

· Build the solution à Successful. Nice

· Next thing is to configure BizTalk Receive and Send port.

· Open BizTalk Administration Console and select the Application where you want the Receive and Send Port.

· Next create a new Receive Port name TestRcvPort and a Receive Location for it name TestRcvLocation.

· For the Receive Location select the Type as “WCF-NetNamePipe” and in than click Configure.

· For the Address URI copy the URI which you specified in the Code. There is a very cool thing about this, you can fetch this URI from SSO Config also. I will show this in my next blog. But for now let hard code it. "net.pipe://localhost/SendBizTalk".

· Nothing to be changed in the Binding Tab. Next is the Security Tab, by default it would be Transport, so change it to None.

IMPORTANT: If you have Security set to None, then you code should also reflect the same security configuration. Like in the code above you can see the following line which sets the security as none.

NetNamedPipeBinding b = new NetNamedPipeBinding();

b.Security.Mode = NetNamedPipeSecurityMode.None;

· Nothing to be changed in the Messages tab. Select the Receive Pipeline you want to use. For this test App I have PassThruReceive. You can use your own custom Pipeline or use ESB pipelines and then complete ESB stuff i.e. XMLDissembler, BRE, Maps etc etc but for now lets keep it simple.

· Next to create a Send Port named “TestSndPort”. Select the Type as File and Configure it to point to some file location.

· In the Filer tab select the BTS.ReceivePortName == TestRcvPort

· Start/Enable the Receive Location and Send Port. Put a test message you want to test at C:\Test\In\Test.xml location. Run the Console app and check the output for the Send Port. Success….!!!!!

· Total time of creating the app with the same piece of code and using any xml à around 5 mins.

· Time for entire code to run with simple BizTalk artifacts à Fraction of Second.

Thanks,

Vishal