Jesus Built My Hotrod

Rob Addis — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:36:16 GMT

A new online BizTalk mag has come out, a more pleasent read than most whitepapers, especially if you're a motor head or a fan of that Ministry song.

Unable to open Orchestration Designer in Visual Studio

Rob Addis — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:55:30 GMT

We are developing BizTalk applications with Visual Studio Team Edition and every now and then for some reason the Orchestration Designer is removed from the "Open With" dialog, thus when one double clicks on an orchestration it is opened with the Xml Editor. Although I'm not sure why this happens, I suspected the items in this dialog were configured in the Windows Registry ... and so they were, so to fix:

1) Open RegEdit
2) Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Editors and find the BizTalk Orchestration Designer for us it was under Guid {679b7fd6-2104-42b2-8d87-86dd575fc269}
3) Get the package key Guid, for us this was {2f926337-2bfb-46ab-bbc4-a955ce25ff6f}
4) Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Packages\{Package Key Guid}\SkipLoading
5) Set the SkipLoading key to 0
6) Restart Visual Studio and the Orchestration Designer should show up in the "Open With" list

Does anyone know why the SkipLoading key is mysterously turned on for the Orchestration Designer?

System Testing BizTalk Applications with BAM & Xlsb File Generation

Rob Addis — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:37:00 GMT

In the past I have noticed that system testers find it difficult to test middleware applications such as those implemented using BizTalk. System testers generally don't want to read BizTalk xml messages dumped out to disk, they like to be able to query for their test results via some form of GUI. Many are adept at writing SQL to return result sets containing the test data they want to analyze.

I came up with the idea of using BAM relationships between different activities within a single view to log before and after snapshots of BizTalk messages. So when messages were transformed by maps, orchestrations or the BRE system testers could test those transforms. You can then give system testers’ access to the BAM Portal Website where they could view and query these before and after snapshots and match the actuals against the expected results to pass or fail their tests.

This solution for system testing only works for certain scenarios’ with certain types of schemas as each message logged cannot contain repeating records if it is to be logged to BAM.

So what am I on about? Take a single record schema which validates an xml message like the one below as I said before this technique won't work with messages which contain multiple records.

<ns1:SampleTransaction TransactionID="123456" ProductName="ABC" Amount="1234.56" Quantity="24" xmlns:ns1="http://SynbogalooSamples/SampleTransaction/1.0.0.0" />

Each time a map, orchestration or business rules were applied to a message I wanted to send messages to BAM so I was basically just logging messages to BAM each time the contents of the message changed. I used BAM relationships to associate the message before it was transformed to the message after it was transformed so the tester could assess whether the transformation worked.

OK this was all easy but very time consuming using the Excel add-in to create the xlsb files for each schema so I wrote a simple xlsb file generator. Note: For this code to work with schemas that have xsd types other than DateTime, Integer, Double and String you will need to add to the switch statement in the CreateActivity method.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using System.IO;

namespace BAMXslbGenerator
{
    class Program
    {
        private const string UCName = "Name";
        private const string LCName = "name";
        private const string View = "View";
        private const string BAMDefinition = "BAMDefinition";
        private const string BAMDefinitionNamespace = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalkServer/2004/10/BAM";
        private const string Extension = "Extension";
        private const string OWC = "OWC";
        private const string OWCNamespace = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel";
        private const string ActivityView = "ActivityView";
        private const string ActivityRef = "ActivityRef";
        private const string Activity = "Activity";
        private const string Alias = "Alias";
        private const string CheckpointRef = "CheckpointRef";
        private const string Id = "ID";
        private const string Checkpoint = "Checkpoint";
        private const string XpathToAttribute =
            "(//*[local-name()='element'])[last()]/*[local-name()='complexType']/*[local-name()='attribute']";
        private const string DataType = "DataType";
        private const string DataLength = "DataLength";
        private const string Length = "length";
        private const string MaxLength = "maxLength";
        private const string XpathToLength = "*[local-name()='simpleType']/*[local-name()='restriction']/*[local-name()='length']/@value";
        private const string XpathToMaxLength = "*[local-name()='simpleType']/*[local-name()='restriction']/*[local-name()='maxLength']/@value";
        private const string SqlDateTime = "DATETIME";
        private const string SqlNvarchar = "NVARCHAR";
        private const string SqlInt = "INT";
        private const string SqlFloat = "FLOAT";
        private const string XsdDateTime = "xs:dateTime";
        private const string XsdString = "xs:string";
        private const string XsdInteger = "xs:int";
        private const string XsdDouble = "xs:double";

private static StringBuilder xlsbText = null;

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                //Check for help
                if (args.Length == 0)
                {
                    ShowUsageMessage();
                }
                else if ((args[0] == "/?") || (args[0] == "/help"))
                {
                    ShowUsageMessage();
                }
                else
                {
                    //Parse out command line arguements
                    string xlsbFileNameArg = GetCommand("/x", args);
                    string viewNameArg = GetCommand("/v", args);
                    string activityNameArg = GetCommand("/a", args).Replace("[","").Replace("]","");
                    string schemaArg = GetCommand("/s", args).Replace("[", "").Replace("]", ""); ;

                    if (xlsbFileNameArg != string.Empty && viewNameArg != string.Empty
                        && activityNameArg != string.Empty && schemaArg != string.Empty)
                    {
                        string[] activityNames = activityNameArg.Split(new string[] { "," }, StringSplitOptions.None);
                        string[] schemas = schemaArg.Split(new string[] { "," }, StringSplitOptions.None);

                        GenerateXlsbXml(viewNameArg, activityNames, schemas);

                        //Write out the file
                        File.Delete(xlsbFileNameArg);
                        File.AppendAllText(xlsbFileNameArg, xlsbText.ToString(), Encoding.Unicode);
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine("Incorrect arguements!");
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (System.Exception ex)
            {
                Console.Write(ex.ToString());
            }
        }

        private static string GetCommand(string commandToken, string[] args)
        {
            string commandValue = string.Empty;

            for (int i = 0; i < args.Length; i++)
            {
                if (args[i] == commandToken)
                {
                    commandValue = args[i + 1];
                    break;
                }
            }
            return commandValue;
        }

        private static void ShowUsageMessage()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Generates an xlsb BAM definition file conaining one view and multiple schema definitions to log to BAM.");
            Console.WriteLine("Syntax: BAMXlsbGenerator");
            Console.WriteLine("Commands:");
            Console.WriteLine("\t/x \txlsb file name");
            Console.WriteLine("\t/v \tBAM View definition name");
            Console.WriteLine("\t/a[] \tActivity names enclosed in [] comma separated, there must be one activity name per schema.");
            Console.WriteLine("\t/s[] \tSchema names enclosed in [] comma separated, there must be one schema name per activity.");
            Console.WriteLine("\t/? or /help \tDisplay this usage message");
        }

        private static void GenerateXlsbXml(string viewName, string[] activityNames, string[] schemas)
        {
            //Create an writer for building the xlsb
            xlsbText = new StringBuilder();
            XmlWriterSettings xmlWriterSettings = new XmlWriterSettings();
            xmlWriterSettings.Indent = true;
            XmlWriter xlsbWriter = XmlWriter.Create(xlsbText, xmlWriterSettings);

            //Start building xml
            xlsbWriter.WriteStartDocument();
            xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(BAMDefinition, BAMDefinitionNamespace);

            if (schemas.Length != activityNames.Length)
            {
                throw new ApplicationException("The number of activity names and schemas don't match.");
            }

Dictionary<string, string>[] checkpointIDsForSchemas = new Dictionary<string, string>[schemas.Length];
string[] activityIDs = new string[schemas.Length];

            //Create the activities
            for (int i = 0; i < schemas.Length; i++)
            {
                Dictionary<string, string> checkpointIDs;
                string activityID;
                CreateActivity(xlsbWriter, schemas[i], activityNames[i],
                    out checkpointIDs, out activityID);
                checkpointIDsForSchemas[i] = checkpointIDs;
                activityIDs[i] = activityID;
            }

            //Now create the view
            xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(View);
            xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(UCName, viewName);
            string viewID = Id + Guid.NewGuid().ToString("N");
            xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(Id, viewID);

            //Create Activity Views
            for (int i = 0; i < schemas.Length; i++)
            {
                CreateActivityView(xlsbWriter, activityNames[i],
                    checkpointIDsForSchemas[i], activityIDs[i]);
            }

xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //END View

xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(Extension);
xlsbWriter.WriteElementString(OWC, OWCNamespace, "");

            xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //END Extension
            xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //END BAMDefinition
            xlsbWriter.WriteEndDocument();
            xlsbWriter.Flush();
        }

        private static void CreateActivityView(XmlWriter xlsbWriter, string activityName,
            Dictionary<string, string> checkpointIDs, string activityID)
        {
            xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(ActivityView);
            xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(UCName, View + activityName);
            xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(Id, Id + Guid.NewGuid().ToString("N"));
            xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(ActivityRef, activityID);

            //Loop through the dictionary and create the Aliases
            foreach (string key in checkpointIDs.Keys)
            {
                xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(Alias);
                xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(UCName, key);
                xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(Id, Id + Guid.NewGuid().ToString("N"));
                xlsbWriter.WriteElementString(CheckpointRef, checkpointIDs[key]);
                xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //END Alias
            }

xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //END ActivityView
}

        private static void CreateActivity(XmlWriter xlsbWriter, string schema,
            string activityName, out Dictionary<string, string> checkpointIDs,
            out string activityID)
        {
            xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(Activity);
            xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(UCName, activityName);
            activityID = Id + Guid.NewGuid().ToString("N");
            xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(Id, activityID);

//Create a dictionary object to store the IDs in
checkpointIDs = new Dictionary<string, string>();

            //Open the schema
            XmlDocument xmlDocument = new XmlDocument();
            xmlDocument.Load(schema);

//The rules are

XmlNodeList xmlNodeList = xmlDocument.SelectNodes(XpathToAttribute);

            //Loop through all the attributes and create the new xslb schema
            foreach (XmlNode xmlNode in xmlNodeList)
            {
                string checkpointID = Id + Guid.NewGuid().ToString("N");
                checkpointIDs.Add(xmlNode.Attributes[LCName].Value, checkpointID);

                //Add the data type attributes
                if (xmlNode.OuterXml.Contains(XsdDateTime))
                {
                    xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(Checkpoint);
                    xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(UCName, xmlNode.Attributes[LCName].Value);
                    xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(Id, checkpointID);

xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(DataType, SqlDateTime);

                    xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //End Checkpoint
                }
                else if (xmlNode.OuterXml.Contains(XsdInteger))
                {
                    xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(Checkpoint);
                    xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(UCName, xmlNode.Attributes[LCName].Value);
                    xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(Id, checkpointID);

xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(DataType, SqlInt);

                    xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //End Checkpoint
                }
                else if (xmlNode.OuterXml.Contains(XsdDouble))
                {
                    xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(Checkpoint);
                    xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(UCName, xmlNode.Attributes[LCName].Value);
                    xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(Id, checkpointID);

xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(DataType, SqlFloat);

                    xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //End Checkpoint
                }
                else if (xmlNode.InnerXml.Contains(XsdString))
                {
                    xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(Checkpoint);
                    xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(UCName, xmlNode.Attributes[LCName].Value);
                    xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(Id, checkpointID);

xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(DataType, SqlNvarchar);

                    if (xmlNode.InnerXml.Contains(Length))
                    {
                        xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(DataLength,
                            xmlNode.SelectSingleNode(XpathToLength).InnerText);
                    }
                    else if (xmlNode.InnerXml.Contains(MaxLength))
                    {
                        xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(DataLength,
                            xmlNode.SelectSingleNode(XpathToMaxLength).InnerText);
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(DataLength, "255");
                    }

                    xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //End Checkpoint
                }
                else if (xmlNode.OuterXml.Contains(XsdString))
                {
                    xlsbWriter.WriteStartElement(Checkpoint);
                    xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(UCName, xmlNode.Attributes[LCName].Value);
                    xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(Id, checkpointID);

xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(DataType, SqlNvarchar);
xlsbWriter.WriteAttributeString(DataLength, "255");

                    xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //End Checkpoint
                }
                else
                {
                    Console.Write("Unknown xsd datatype: " + xmlNode.OuterXml + " continuing to create xlsb.");
                    checkpointIDs.Remove(xmlNode.Attributes[LCName].Value);
                }
            }
            xlsbWriter.WriteEndElement(); //End Activity
        }
    }
}

How to call example: BAMXlsbGenerator /x "C:\Projects\SynboogalooSamples\Test.xlsb" /v TestView /a [TestActivityA,TestActivityB] /s [C:\Projects\SynboogalooSamples\SampleTransactionA.xsd,C:\Projects\SynboogalooSamples\SampleTransactionB.xsd]

This saved me a lot of time all I needed to do now to finish setting up BAM was deploy the xlsb BAM definition using the BM.exe tool and use the Tracking Profile Editor to associate the message payload with the BAM activity definition about 5 minutes of drag n' drop work. In the BAM Portal system testers can query transformed data and can even query the BAM tables if they want. They are able through BAM relationships to view the message contents each time it has been modified and logged to BAM.

I found this technique was a quick and simple way of empowering system testers to test BizTalk applications.

I should note another option for System Testing EAI solutions is to go with an implementation of FIT (Framework For Integration Testing) here is a blog with more info.

Rob

Passed the BizTalk 2006 Exam

Rob Addis — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 09:25:00 GMT

84% it wasn't that bad, but it should have been easy after 3+ years working with BizTalk, lots on BAM and the BRE. I think I lost marks on the drag and drop questions and there was a tricky question on coding a BRE fact retriever. I used Saravana's exam preparation diary.

BizTalk R2 Beta 2 is supposed to be a public release, so non-TAPpers can get their hands on it

Rob Addis — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 08:26:00 GMT

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Beta 2 released - Thanks Mike ;)

in a sequential convoy the ports must be identical

Rob Addis — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 08:46:00 GMT

A client was getting this compile error "in a sequential convoy the ports must be identical" when compiling an orchestration which had two consecutive receive ports in a sequential convoy. The answer was simple they needed to use a concurrent convoy not a sequential convoy.

Goodbye Synergy hello London

Rob Addis — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 08:33:00 GMT

I haven't posted for a while I've just finished work on a Banks SOA framework written with extensive use of WCF (which is very very extensible!). Started work implementing their Kiwisaver group investments initiative in BizTalk 2006 R2. We were one of the first out of the blocks in utilising the R2 WCF adapter (could be a bit more configurable), the WCF interceptor and AS2 adapter (interesting BAM continuations). Then after 3 years I decided to leave Synergy and go freelance for a while before moving back to the UK. On the same day I left Synergy I sold my bach and bought a new investment property so it's been busy.

It's been a truly fabulous 3 years working for Synergy International in New Zealand which has recently been re-branded as Fronde. For those of you looking for a change to kick start career development this professional organisation is continuing to grow in all the right directions, they offer great training opportunities, working and learning from very experienced people in a family oriented enviroment.

Well for the next few months I'm integrating a portfolio CRM to an investment banks core trading systems again in BizTalk and among other things using BAM for system testing which I will post on later.

Ciao

Rob