WCF SQL Adapter - BizTalk Server 2009

WCF SQL Adapter, seems confusing, well terms seems confusing but the adapter is not, The BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 now contains fve system and data adapters including

SAP, Siebel, Oracle databases, Oracle applications, and SQL Server.

Till now BizTalk adapter were built using defined BizTalk adapter framework and which based on standard interface and API, now reaching next stage professionals were encouraged by Microsoft to use WCF LOB Adepter SDK. This is new framework which offers evolution of BizTalk conventional armoury, and based of WCF framework.

All adapter in Pack 2.0 built upon WCF LOB meta-data rich components that are surfaced to use WCF bindings, almost similar which you expect from WCF binding. Excellent set of configuration options and flexibility offered by new adapter pack and saving thousands of bucks for connecting premium enterprise application system, e.g. SAP, JDE, other ERP/CRMs etc.

This pack also include SQL Server Adapter, which replace the legacy version of BizTalk as well offer much more flexibility and features. Also it offers significant benefit the previous rage adapter and introduce a range of new capabilities that overdue in realm of database interaction.

Well, I'll try to get some time and elaborate this new excellent chunk of Server 2009.

Consuming WCF Services in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 - Add generated items (WCF Services)

I was thinking a long back to come up with this article, and now just found time to write about WCF services and it's implementation with BizTalk Server 2006 R2. I have designed few small solutions in past few months to deal with scenarios like Information Integration and SOA with BizTalk Server R2, where I found the great chance to work upon the WCF adapter series as well as Web Service Factory : Modeling Edition. Both made me big fan of them, it's great to work on both, I am not focusing on WebService Factory modeling in this article but will discuss about WCF services consumption inside BizTalk and few videos might help people to work on them.

I would like to share few images below, by reading this images you can understand the service I have coded for sample, if you are interested in sample code please mail me, and I promise you will find that sample someday in you mail box... when that I don't know. :-) But will try send you soon as possible for me.

The best way I feel to consume WCF services inside BizTalk solution is by using WCF Services Consume Wizard which you can find in Visual Studio Template, this wizard will power you by generating schema and port binding configuration files for your solution based on service descriptions. Not going into deep how this work internally here but focusing on the practice I gone through.

Below image shows Generated Items and Visual Studio Template.

Please have a look to the below Video Presentation where you can find what steps I followed to generate my sample project. Hope it will surely help you in any manner while working with WCF and BizTalk together.

As result of Wizard you will get schema and binding files inside your solution, that schema will be generated on basis of the metadata of the consumed services and it could be used as multipart messages in case of request-response services. Below snaps will show you the BizTalk schema presentation against the .net message contracts and data contracts.

DataContract Source Code:


MessageContract Source Code:


Service Implementation Code:


BizTalk Schema:



BizTalk Test Message I used for my sample:

You can analyze your self the presentation of Inbound message and the Contract representation inside WCF Implementation upon the above snaps. You can consume the generated schema in routine BizTalk solutions and patterns, while deploying such solution you can use generated binding information for such implementation with Endpoint transportation and Behavior information regarding WCF hosting and services. It is very good feature provided by wizard which make our life very easy :-). Let's have a view to below video presentation on the WCF Http and Custom Adapter configuration inside through BizTalk administrator console.

Hope you liked this article and it will give you fair idea about the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and WCF coupling in Solution, as a system/solution designer point of view I really enjoyed to work with this two made for each other technologies and it provide such ease to workout most complex scenarios regarding service orientation and integration. As well as I realize the solution's capability to work over Internet Integration where security is the major concern and we generally prefers to go with ws-HTTP or HTTP channels for integration, on such scale it can help us to give such secured integration system.

Please provide your feedback about the article at nilayparikh@gmail.com.

BizTalk 2006 R2 with PeopleSoft Integration & MicroSoft BizTalk PeopleSoft Adapter Overview

Recently, I come accords requirement to integrate PeopleSoft ERP implementation within existing ESB. I have worked on many PeopleSoft integration through BizTalk, so just taking opportunity to write something exciting about knowledge I have gathered.

MicroSoft is very much aware about importance of PeopleSoft ERP and it's huge existence in Industry, so BizTalk R2 LOB adapter set has include PeopleSoft adapter which is very useful artifact during our PeopleSoft integration, it facilitate developer in many manners like developing schemas, messages. There are few limitation also we are facing with the adapter but those limitation could be overseen with different kind of implementation patterns and of course we can archive most of requirement what we want to with the adapter. There are also many third party adapters are available for PeopleSoft integration but I have explored more, the only one third party adapter I have worked with is iWay last year, yes it is very impressive but while comparing overall prospective I would defiantly go with R2 LOB. But it purely depend on the requirement and what extend we are looking for integrate the systems.

Microsoft Line of Business PeopleSoft Adapter's Architecture.

LOB PeopleSoft adapter's Prerequisites:
# The Java 2 Platform must be installed on the BizTalk Server that the BizTalk Adapter for PeopleSoft Enterprise is running on.
# The PeopleSoft Java Object Adapter JAR file, psjoa.jar should be copied to a folder that is accessible to the BizTalk Server that the BizTalk Adapter for PeopleSoft Enterprise is running on.

Implementation & Design Patterns:
BizTalk PeopleSoft adapter facilitate your requirement to query and receive data from PeopleSoft ERP also you can do basic data operation like Insert, Update and Delete. But here one thing very clear, but it will not allow live integration from outbound direction (from PeopleSoft). To archive such requirement you can implement services inside PeopleSoft which can push live data feed into any queue or physical location where BizTalk or any external service can monitor feeds with very less latency, so how you can get such live implementation.

I would like to share the architecture, I designed for such live implementation landscape recently. You can view the picturing below.

The above architecture, I designed for the two-way integration with PeopleSoft for our client. Low latency outbound messaging integration can be archived by MSMQ or any other queuing implementation between BizTalk and PeopleSoft. Also many time in different scenario requirement we need information integration between different systems that could be archive through cutting edge technology like WCF / WSE 2.0 where BizTalk R2 provide functionality integrate such services, you can also give term like 'EII' to such implementation. More over by implementing such landscape we are moving towards service orientation and service bus. BizTalk provides a ease to integrate many systems within such implementation, also it leverage extensibility of ERP implementation.

You can also go through below links for further references at MSDN.

1. Tutorial: Using the BizTalk Adapter for PeopleSoft Enterprise to Retrieve Data from PeopleSoft Enterprise
2. Tutorial: Using the BizTalk Adapter for PeopleSoft Enterprise to Write Data to PeopleSoft Enterprise

Please provide your valuable feedback on nilayparikh@gmail.com.

BizTalk Server R2 - WCF HTTP Binding through BizTalk WCF Adepter

A very good video demonstration by Stephen W. Thomas, the video demonstrate WCF HTTP Binding through BizTalk WCF Adepter. Worth spending 13 minutes on the video.

To download the video please Click Here

Downloading the related sample files might also be helpful. They can be found here:
Click Here

Live Play (no need to download the file) of this video is available here:
Click Here

Microsoft BizTalk Adapter for SAP – Part 1 (Introduction)

The Microsoft BizTalk Adapter v2.0 for mySAP Business Suite i s a "no-code" connectivity solution that integrates SAP data seamlessly from SAP R/3 4.X and R/3 6.20 (Enterprise) systems with BizTalk Server. The adapter provides services to support the transport of IDocs, BAPIs, and RFCs (including customized IDocs) inbound and outbound between BizTalk Server and SAP.

The Adapter supports the following SAP schema types:

• Business API (BAPI)
  
• Intermediate Document (IDoc) versions 2.0 and 3.0
  
• Remote Function Call (RFC)
  

Multiple IDoc, BAPI, and RFC schemas can be selected for each adapter in stance. The Adapter provides the following functionality:

• Supports synchronous and asynchronous transactions
  
• Provides full transactional support for all IDoc, BAPI, and RFC schemas
  
• Converts SAP structures to XML Schema Definition language (XSD) format
  

Microsoft BizTalk Adapter for mySAP Business Suite includes:

• Design-time (using the standard functionality available in the BizTalk adapter framework)
  
• Schema generation wizard
  
• BizTalk Explorer configuration pages
  
• BizTalk Administrator configuration pages
  
• Run-time
  
• Transmitter -The transmitter sends IDocs, BAPIs, and RFCs to the appropriate SAP system via the .NET
  
• Connector. If the SAP system is not available, the transmission can be retried, or sent to a suspend queue,
  
• Depending on user configuration.
  
• Receiver -The receiver acts as a listener, waiting for IDocs, BABIs, and RFCs to be sent by SAP via the .NET
  
• Connector.
  
• More than one receiver can be configured, in order to receive data from multiple SAP systems, and to
  
• Provide load balancing.
  
• Exception handling -The adapter provides full transactional support between SAP and BizTalk Server. If
  
• There is a failure in receiving or sending, the transaction is rolled back.

Microsoft BizTalk adepter comes with two components, first is runtime module called BizTalk/SAP adepter, which is communicating with SAP. Another is design time component that integrates Visual Studio design time functionality to adepter.

This Wizard is use to connect to SAP through a port defined on machine, search lists of SAP functions (BAPIs and IDOCS), and select the function to call. The wizard generates schema (xsd) for messages you need to receive/ send from SAP. If the selected port is two way (Request/Response) then it generates two root schemas for the request and the response types.

BAPI/RFC Interface

The RFC Library offers an interface to a SAP System. The RFC Library is the most commonly used and installed component of existing SAP Software. This interface provides the opportunity to call any RFC function in a SAP System from an external application. Moreover, the RFC Library offers the possibility to write a RFC Server Program, which is accessible from any SAP System or external application. Most SAP Connectors use the RFC Library as communication platform to SAP Systems. SAP provides the RFC API in the form of C -routines, incorporated in the RFC Library. The RFC Library is available on all SAP Supported Platforms. The RFC Library is forward and backward compatible, i.e. an older release of the RFC Library can communicate with a SAP System at a higher version and vice versa.

IDoc Interface

IDoc, or Intermediate Document, is a standard SAP document format that allows to link different application systems via a message-based interface. The three main goals of IDocs are:

• Structuring the exchange of business documents so they are automatically processed.
  
• Reducing the structural complexity of different application systems to as simple a structure as possible.
  
• Extensive exception handling before posting data to the application.
  
• IDocs are defined and considered on two levels, the technical and the business level. The former allows them to support application-independent functions, e. g. routing and handling technical exceptions.
  

Referances:

• MSDN Library
  
• MS SAP Adepter Documentation
  

Very soon I will present the next part of the SAP Adepter Series.