Tricks with Schemas Part 2: Referencing Schemas from Third Party WebServices

“Schemas are the soul of BizTalk. They alone create attack and defense, the way they are deployed decides the fate of the game.”

 

 

I wanted to record another neat trick from Richard Seroter which saved my bacon recently. I was dealing with a third part who used a web services that did not seem to know obey most of the normal rules of the game. No matter how I tried I could not add a reference to it in any project. What made matters worse is that the third party could tell me what schema they expected! Goggling, I found this article Consuming Web Services in BizTalk Without Web Reference « Richard Seroter’s Architecture Musings. This was exactly what needed, it is a brilliant trick.

 

I followed Richard’s instructions and created a C# proxy class library simply by submitting the URL of the third party web services to wsdl.exe. The next step was to reference this class in a project, call all the methods from the proxy class and create the schema that the third party was using. The other bonus was that I SOAP port required could be created in a flash by referencing the C# proxy class library in the SOAP port as described in Richard’s article. Weeks of misery evaporated into thin air. Thanks again Richard.

 

Next time I’ll write about something from my own projects namely “An alternative to the POP3 adapter”.

Tricks with Schemas Part 1: De-batching from a SQL Receive Port

“Schemas are the soul of BizTalk. They alone create attack and defense, the way they are deployed decides the fate of the game.”

 

 

I have been doing a lot with this pattern lately and I know of two ways to do this namely;

• Walkthrough: Disassembling Result Sets Using the SQL Adapter  
• De-batching Inbound Messages From BizTalk SQL Adapter 

The first pattern is from Microsoft but I like the second pattern which is from a blog article by Richard Seroter. Richard’s blog is one blog I read all the time and I have stolen many ideas from it. Keep up the good work Richard. Why do I like this pattern? It works.

I found one gotcha with the ‘Seroter’ pattern. If your SQL schema has been created from a temporary table like SELECT * from #temptable FOR XML AUTO, ELEMENTS then you will get an error when you try to import using XSD include. The error happens because of the way BizTalk represent the ‘#’ symbol in XML. The solution is to not use # i.e. do something like SELECT * from #temptable AS temptable FOR XML AUTO, ELEMENTS. Interestingly enough if after you have created your entire schema you can add the # symbol and everything still works. So it is just the XSD import that has the problems.

 

I often find that I also have to promote or distinguish some of the elements on the resulting SQL adapter schemas and I have found the following blog article by eliasen – Promoting elements from SQL Adapter Schemas that describes an easy way to do this.

 

Finally if you are de-batching just so you can submit your messages to a SQL send port one by one don’t bother. See this article by Multiple Stored Procedure Calls using the BizTalk SQL Adapter without a loop shape « Connected Thoughts – Thiago Almeida

A challenge accepted – My first post and blog

Thiago, one of my mates at work challenged me to start writing about some of the BizTalk stuff I do. He has a pretty cool blog himself at http://connectedthoughts.wordpress.com/.

So here goes. My name is Mark Brimble and I have worked connecting disparate computer systems together since 1995. My favourite tool that I use now is BizTalk. I’ve come a long way from 1995 when i was trying to get laboratory instruments to send data to L.I.M.S. using a product called Yukon. Gosh what i would have given to have something like BizTalk then. I spent many years in the wilderness using a variety of point to point applications to integrate a variety of systems. In 2001 a guy called Mark Venter got me involved with eGate which is a Java based integration tool by SeeBeyond. This product has now morphed into JavaCaps by Sun. Both these products a pretty damn good and I worked with these until 2006.

In 2002 I was first introduced to BizTalk 2002. What a dog that was but .. then came BizTalk 2004 and that got me interested in what Microsoft had to offer. That was a marvellous addition to the tools that i could now use to integrate different applications. In 2006 i joined the ‘Microsoft integrated systems division’ of one of NZ largest software houses and now I only use BizTalk and occasionally SSIS. I am a MCTS qualified in BizTalk Server 2006 and BizTalk 2006R2.

Enough about me. What is this blog going to be about? Well i hope to;

• share some useful stuff for other system integrators
• stimulate others to use the best integration patterns available
• write about BizTalk.

Finally what’s  with the name of this blog? This is a play on Thiago blog name and because I am a reasonable chess player I will occasionally add some chess pictures at the end of my blogs. This time I’ll finish with quote about pawns;

“Pawns are the soul of the game. They alone create attack and defense, the way they are deployed decides the fate of the game.” Francois Andre Danican-Philidor