WCF LOB Adapter SDK and BizTalk Adapter Pack : Adapter Pack

Introducing the Migration Tool for Microsoft BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications

nitinme — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:03:00 GMT

For customers currently using the Microsoft BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications (aka the LOB adapters) and willing to migrate their existing projects to the WCF-based LOB adapters, here's a tool that will help you migrate your projects to work with BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0.

Before we start talking about the tool and the adapter projects it can be used against, let us set the ground by laying the rules for the naming convention that we will be using here:

Microsoft BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications adapters are referred to as non-WCF LOB adapters.
Adapters part of BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 are referred to as WCF-based LOB adapters.

What does the tool do?

The migration tool accepts BizTalk project/Solution files containing schemas generated by non-WCF LOB adapters and generates corresponding new BizTalk project/solution files having schemas corresponding to the WCF-based LOB adapters, with the maps and orchestrations modified accordingly. This tool helps you to migrate the projects for the following adapters:

BizTalk ODBC Adapter for Oracle Database
BizTalk Adapter v2.0 for mySAP Business Suite
SQL adapter

Where to get the tool from?

You can download the tool from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=153328. The tool also includes a migration guide that describes:

How to run the tool
What steps to follow after the tool has finished migrating the project
Limitations of the migration tool.

Connection failure when using the WCF Siebel Adapter

SandeepP — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 07:07:00 GMT

I have seen quite a few instances where people run into issues while using the WCF Siebel adapter because of

a. Siebel Web Client is not installed correctly on the machine

b. Or the URI passed to the adapter, that eventually gets transformed to the connection string passed to Siebel, is incorrect

In order to eliminate the above 2 as possible causes, you can try out the following sample code that will use the Siebel COM interface to directly talk with Siebel (adapter is not involved). Please make sure you don’t see any error messages.

/// Application that will issue Login-Logoff request to Siebel

///

/// To run this program,

/// - Set ConnectString, Username and Password. ConnectString is of the format

/// siebel://host/EnterpriseServer/AppObjMgr/SiebelServer

/// (SiebelServer is required in case of Siebel 7.5)

/// For an example, please see the code below.

/// - Add a reference to sstchca.dll (found in siebel client install folder)

/// - Compile and run the program

/// - If the login fails, you will see an error message

using System;

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

using SiebelBusObjectInterfaces;

namespace Sample

{

class Program

{

const string ConnectString = "host=\"siebel://adapsblsrvr77:2321/ent77/SSEObjMgr_enu";

const string Username = "abc";

const string Password = "def";

static void Main(string[] args)

{

SiebelDataControl sdc = null;

bool loggedIn = false;

try

{

/// Create a connection

sdc = new SiebelDataControl();

sdc.EnableExceptions(1);

sdc.Login(ConnectString, Username, Password);

loggedIn = true;

}

catch (COMException ex)

{

Console.WriteLine("ERROR: " + ex.ToString());

}

finally

{

if (sdc != null)

{

if (loggedIn)

{

sdc.Logoff();

}

Marshal.ReleaseComObject(sdc);

sdc = null;

}

Console.WriteLine("Press any key to terminate...");

Console.ReadLine();

}

Things to consider when writing WCF LOB Adapters for consumption through BizTalk

SandeepP — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:22:00 GMT

If you are writing a WCF LOB adapter that can be consumed through BizTalk, you need to be aware of certain issues that can manifest because of the way BizTalk interacts with WCF adapters. Some of these can have performance and scalability impact and hence you should consider them when designing/configuring the adapter.

Processing in IConnection/IConnectionFactory instance – When using SSO, for each message, BizTalk will end up creating a new IConnectionFactory and a new IConnection instance. If your adapter is doing a lot of processing in either of those instances, it can cause significant performance impact. So you will need to think of alternatives – possibly doing the processing upfront and caching.
Caching of LOB artifacts on IConnection instance – Typically you will have some LOB artifacts that will comprise the context associated with an IConnection instance. If your adapter is using WCF LOB Adapter SDK’s connection pooling, in the non SSO scenario, the IConnection instances will be closed only when the idle connection timeout expires. So you need to think about freeing up the LOB resources that comprise your connection context. If you make idle connection timeout too small, it would impact performance since LOB connection creation will incur an overhead and if you keep it at a large value then you will be holding on to LOB artifacts for a longer time than you really need to, possible scalability/performance impact.
Throughput stall – You can find more details about the issue on http://blogs.msdn.com/adapters/archive/2008/08/18/throughput-stalls-when-using-adapters-developed-against-the-wcf-lob-adapter-sdk-in-biztalk.aspx. Note that if you don’t limit the number of concurrent connections through your adapter, you won’t run into this problem. The problem happens the contention between Open and Send/Execute for thread pool threads.
Writing/promoting properties to BizTalk message context – When the adapter receives a WCF message from BizTalk, it will have all the properties comprising the BizTalk message context. For messages that originate from the adapter, if you want to have properties either written/promoted to BizTalk message context, you can look at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb246105.aspx on how to go about doing that.
Transaction overhead – BizTalk will by default start a transaction and send the message/process the response in that transaction scope. This can cause a significant overhead particularly if say the LOB doesn’t support transactions. In BizTalk 2009, there is an option on the Send port that lets you configure whether transactions should be enabled or not.

Oracle EBS/DB Adapter Changes in Beta

Sai Shankar — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:48:00 GMT

As the Beta release for the Adapter pack approaches, here's a list of changes in the Oracle EBS/DB Adapters so that you can prepare for it:

· Now support Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008

· Based on Oracle ODP.Net 11.1.0.7

Both adapters now _require_ ODP.Net 11.1.0.7 installed on the client as compared to ODP.Net 11.1.0.6 which was the base for CTP 5 and earlier. Doing this enables us to deliver x64 support.

· Added Synonym support

Both adapters now support synonyms. Synonyms show up in the object tree wherever the underlying artifact (table/view etc.) of that type can occur. Synonyms are supported for the following types.

Tables
Views
Materialized views
Sequences
Procedures
Functions
Packages

Synonyms are not supported for:

Types
Synonyms

In addition, synonyms pointing to DB links are not supported.

· Added performance counters

We’ve added performance counters to both Adapters which are described in the online help.

· Added notification support, support for User Defined Types (UDTs) in the DB Adapter

Please note that this is not a complete list of changes. That list is available in the online documentation.

BizTalk Adapter Pack v2 CTP

Vivek Krishna — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:47:00 GMT

BizTalk Adapter Pack team has released a CTP. This is the 5^th CTP and the first one available publicly for everyone to try. The specific enhancements in this CTP are mostly to the OracleDB adapter(included in the BAPv1) to which we added features like support for polling stored procedures and composite operations. We also added 64 bit support for the Oracle EBS adapter.In addition we have addressed some feedback we got from the other adapters .

To re-iterate here is the complete list of features BAPv2 is adding . The downloads are available at the connect site for public download(requires sign up with live id)

BizTalk Adapter Pack V2 - Themes

New Adapters

· Oracle EBS Adapter

Ø Browse and search metadata for each Oracle application

Ø Support Interface tables, Interface views

Ø Support for PL/SQL APIs

Ø Concurrent Programs, Request Sets

Ø Support for polling tables, Stored Procedures

Ø Notification support

Ø App context initialization

Ø Supports REF cursors, User Defined Types, LOB types, RECORD types

Ø Support for PL/SQL Tables, boolean data types

Ø Support for MLS EBS installations

Ø Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Integration

Ø Versions supported – ODP.NET 11.1.0.6.21 (available only on 32bit), Oracle EBS 11.5.9, 11.5.10 and 12

· SQL Server Adapter

Ø Insert/Update/Delete/Select operations on tables and views

Ø Invoke (SQL and CLR) Stored procedures, scalar valued functions , table value functions

Ø Supports execution of generic T-SQL statements, via the ExecuteReader(), ExecuteNonQuery() and ExecuteScalar() operations

Ø Configurable polling – polling statement, polling interval, receive multiple result sets

Ø Support for x86 and x64 platforms

Ø Support for new data types in SQL2005 and SQL2008 (notably FILESTREAM, varbinary (max))

Ø Support for UDTs

Ø Ability to pass table value parameters

Ø Composite operations - invoke operations on multiple tables and call any number of stored procedures in the same transaction

Ø SQL query notifications

Ø Ability to directly call stored procedures which used the ‘for xml’ style supported by the BizTalk 2006 SQL adapter to ease backward compatibility

Ø Versions supported – SQL 2000, SQL 2005, SQL 2008

Enhancements to the existing V1 Adapter Pack

Include hot fixes built since the V1 Adapter Pack released
Support new Microsoft Platform releases – BTS 2009, VS 2008, Windows Server 2008
Oracle DB Adapter:

Ø Polling support for Stored procedures and Functions

Ø UDTs, PL/SQL tables

SAP Adapter:

Ø Support for Table Types

Ø Customization of adapter behavior when “special” values obtained for DATS/TIMS/NUMC

Ø SAP ADO Provider Enhancements:

o Support for SSRS

o Support for SAP Queries

o Ability to specify the result set to give to SSIS when executing BAPIs

Siebel Adapter:

Ø MVG operations (associate, dissociate, query) in design time enabled

Ø Bounded pick list fields supported per recommended approach

Ø Context specific custom messages generated for exceptions

Hotfix list for the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack (and related scenarios)

mdoctor — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:04:00 GMT

As and when we release newer hotfixes, I will edit this post.

Hotfix list for the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack V1

Hotfix/KB Number	Component Affected	Description

950101	OracleDB	An error occurs if you try executing a Stored Procedure inside a Package, which belongs to a schema other than the default schema for the user.
950854	SAP	SAP Receive Locations in BizTalk stop working if an exception occurs in the Pipeline.
954539	SAP	By default, the adapter treats special DATS and TIMS values (like 00000000, 99999999, etc) as an error. With this hotfix, a new set of settings are exposed to the user, to allow him/her to configure the behavior when various special values are encountered. There is a blog post here for Adapter Pack V2, but this hotfix (for the Adapter Pack V1) has something very similar.
954233	SAP ADO	A “Reader positioned at invalid row” error is thrown, if you attempt to call GetFieldType() on the SAPDataReader object, if the reader is positioned before the first row or after the last row.
	SAP	The SAP adapter in the Adapter Pack V1 did not support “Table Types”. This hotfix adds support for it.
956168	SAP ADO	The option “no_conversion” does not work for NUMC datatypes. Also, incorrect values may be returned for some numeric fields.
959251	SAP	If an IDoc Segment has a special character in its name, the adapter throws an exception that the Segment information was not found in the metadata.

Hotfix list for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2

Hotfix/KB Number	Component Affected	Description

942612	WCF Adapter	If you use the Message Template feature in the WCF Adapter, the namespaces in the template are not passed to the Custom Binding (the adapters in the Adapter Pack will throw an error indicating that a node with a particular name and namespace was not expected).
960731	WCF Adapter	A Transaction object leaks (and ultimately times out) if an exception is thrown while reading a response message submitted by a transactional binding.

CTP3 of Adapter Pack v2

Vivek Krishna — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:41:00 GMT

CTP3 is here and we have added a lot more features based on some feedback we have been getting from various channels. So here is the list of major enhancements

SQL adapter:

1) Strongly typed polling
2) Strongly typed stored procedures

Oracle Adapter

1)      Inline Value support
2)      App context initialization
3)      Oracle Notifications
4)      ReadLOB/Update LOB operations
5)       PLSQL tables inside RecordTypes
6)      Performance improvement for metadata generation

Others

1) We now support upgrade from APv1 RTM to APv2 CTP3
2) More meaningful schema names for SQL adapter - again a common feedback from customers, we will be doing this for other adapters in next releases

3) Using the SAP ADO provider from SSRS

4) Making WCF LOB adapters more discoverable - one of the common requests was that users have to select WCF-Custom and then sqlbinding or sapbinding from yet another menu in the BTS admin console while configuring ports causing problems with usability and troubleshooting.This has now been fixed and you can choose WCF-SQL or WCF-SAP from the list of send ports.

So go ahead and try out the new CTP and do send in feedback. As always, if you want to try this CTP you need to join the TAP(Technology Adoption Program). You can see the details for joining TAP here .

Thanks

Vivek Krishna

Announcing the Biztalk Adapter Pack Poster

Anjan Das — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:08:00 GMT

We're exicted to announce the availability of the new BizTalk Adapter Pack Poster.

This poster covers interoperability with Line-of-Business Applications using the BizTalk Adapter Pack and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) LOB Adapter SDK.

It depicts the functionality, components, architecture, and usage/hosting scenarios of BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 and of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK. When printed in full scale, this poster size is 38”x 26”.

The poster in PDF format is available for download in the Microsoft Download Center.

We have designed this poster to promote the adoption of the Adapter pack and of the Adapter SDK. This would simplify service enablement and interoperability with Line of Business Applications or any metadata-rich systems.

Announcing availability of May CTP of Adapter Pack V2!

sreeramn — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:33:00 GMT

The BizTalk Adapter Pack team is very happy to announce the release of the first CTP of the Adapter Pack V2. This CTP contains new WCF/ASDK-based Oracle E-Business Suite and SQL adapters for use with BizTalk Server R2. MOSS and any .Net application. This CTP is only available for members who have enrolled into the Adapter Pack V2 TAP program. Please view this blog for details on how to enroll into this program.

Enjoy!

The BizTalk Adapter Pack Team

BizTalk Adapter Pack V1.0 Eval Version available!

sreeramn — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:23:00 GMT

We are announcing the availability of the Eval version of the BizTalk Adapter Pack 1.0! This can downloaded from here. You can use the eval version for development purposes for 120-day from the day of installation.

Party on!

The BizTalk Adapter Pack Team

BizTalk Adapter Pack V2 TAP enrollment open!

sreeramn — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:21:00 GMT

We are close to releasing the initial CTP of the new BizTalk adapter pack which contains the all new SQL and Oracle E-Business suite adapters. We are looking for your help in securing customers to provide validation of these adapters prior to release. Please either direct customers to the connect site or directly to the nomination form below.

BizTalk Adapter Pack V2 TAP is looking for partners and Customers!!!

The BizTalk Adapter Pack V2 Technology Adoption Program (TAP) is an “early adopter” program intended to validate the quality and obtain feedback on the new features in the BizTalk Adapter Pack V2. Customers interested in joining the Adapter Pack TAP should submit a TAP Nomination Form.

BizTalk Adapter Pack V2 - Themes

New Adapters

· Oracle EBS Adapter

Browse and search metadata for each Oracle application
Support Interface tables, Interface views
PL/SQL APIs
Concurrent Programs
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Integration
- ODP.NET 11.1.0.6.21 (currently available only on 32bit)
- Oracle EBS versions supported – 11.5.10.2 and 12
- Oracle DB versions – 9.2, 10.1 and 10.2

· SQL Server Adapter

Insert/Update/Delete/Select operations on tables and views
Invoke (SQL and CLR) Stored procedures, scalar valued functions , table value functions
Supports execution of generic T-SQL statements, via the ExecuteReader(), ExecuteNonQuery() and ExecuteScalar() operations
Configurable polling – polling statement, polling interval, receive multiple result sets
Support for x86 and x64 platforms
Support for new data types in SQL2005 and SQL2008 (notably FILESTREAM, varbinary(max))
UDTs
Ability to pass table value parameters
Composite operations - invoke operations on multiple tables and call any number of stored procedures in the same transaction
SQL query notifications

Enhancements to the existing V1 Adapter Pack

§ Support for new releases of Line of Business Systems

§ Address customer feedback

§ Include hot fixes built since the V1 Adapter Pack released

§ Support new Microsoft Platform releases

BizTalk Adapter Pack on Channel 9

SureshN — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:32:00 GMT

As you all know, the BizTalk® Adapter Pack was released earlier this year and includes WCF based adapters for SAP, Oracle DB and Siebel. We have recently posted a detailed presentation about the Adapter Pack on Channel 9. You can view it at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=394792. Hope you find it useful. Look forward to hearing your feedback.

Announcing the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack – Office Developer Program

sreeramn — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:48:00 GMT

As was already announced on this forum, the BizTalk Adapter Pack (BAP) was announced more than a month ago during the Office Developer Conference and became available starting March 1st. The BAP provides a robust and comprehensive out-of-the-box connectivity infrastructure to three major line-of-business (LOB) systems - SAP, Siebel, and Oracle Databases. The technology is based on the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) LOB Adapter SDK and inherently relies on the core WCF concepts, principles, and classes implemented in the .NET Framework 3.5.

Along with the BAP, we also launched the BizTalk Adapter Pack – Office Developer Program, designed to validate the use of the BizTalk Adapter Pack as a connectivity solution in direct integration scenarios with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and the Office Business Applications such as Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office Word. The scope of the program is validation of six key scenarios, as depicted in the following diagram.

Customer Participation

The BAP - Office Developer Program is now open for new customer nominations. Joining this program will provide you with access to conference calls with members of the BAP development team, access to private discussion forums, and the ability to discuss and report bugs and issues directly back to the team at Microsoft.

If you would like to work closely with the product team and implement and test any of the six scenarios in your solution, please fill out the short survey and be specific in answering the questions to help us accurately evaluate your application. We will contact you shortly thereafter. If you have any questions, you can contact us via e-mail by clicking here.

You can also get additional information about this program on the SharePoint Product Team blog site.

The BizTalk SOA Customer Programs Team

BizTalk Adapter Pack Released

sreeramn — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 05:03:00 GMT

BizTalk® Adapter Pack Launches at Office Developers Conference

On Monday February 11th, we announced availability of the BizTalk® Adapter Pack at the Office Developer Conference. The BizTalk® Adapter Pack provides a single solution to easily and securely connect to Line of Business (LOB) data from any custom-developed .NET application, SQL Server-based business intelligence solution, or an Office Business Application (OBA). The three adapters available in this release are Siebel, SAP and Oracle DB.

The BizTalk Adapter Pack will be generally available on March 1st. Please contact your Microsoft representative for the pricing details. The Adapter Pack license is also included with BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Developer, Standard, and Enterprise editions. It is not included in the Branch edition. Customers that have already purchased BizTalk Server 2006 R2 with Software Assurance will also have access to the BizTalk Adapter Pack through the Software Assurance program.

We also announced the BizTalk Adapter Pack: Office Developer Program. This program provides participants with access to code, support and direct access to the product team for bug fixes and change requests. By working with Office developers directly we will be validate additional Office/SharePoint scenarios. If you are interested in validating your SharePoint and Office scenarios, please visit the following site to register (note that you mean need to log in using Windows Live ID to access this site).

Key Benefits

· Single infrastructure for connectivity. Whether connecting to LOB systems from custom-developed applications, SQL Server, or rich Office applications, customers can use a consistent approach to connectivity. This enables a simplified approach to interoperability that lowers total cost of ownership and reduces training requirements.

· Simple to learn. Built on top of the WCF programming model, the BizTalk® Adapter Pack is easy for .NET trained developer to begin using and building connected applications. The BizTalk Adapter Pack provides enhanced extensions to WCF that enable dynamic metadata discovery and generation – making it fast and easy to access data in corporate systems.

· Secure and reliable. The BizTalk Adapter Pack tightly integrates with the security models provided by the individual business applications, ensuring that users have access only to data which they are permitted to see.

· Improves real-time visibility to your business data. The BizTalk® Adapter Pack allows customers to access valuable corporate information when and where they can use it most productively, increasing visibility and enabling faster, better informed decision making.

-The BizTalk Adapter Pack Team

Positioning the BizTalk Adapter Pack

mahadevanv — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:08:00 GMT

The adapters constituting the BizTalk Adapter Pack are fundamentally custom WCF binding elements. Built on the WCF LOB Adapter SDK, these adapters are host agnostic i.e. they are not tied to a specific product like BizTalk. However, their predecessors, the BizTalk adapters for enterprise applications, are built on the BizTalk Adapter Framework and cannot be used outside BizTalk.

Some of the key themes that contributed to the thinking of the BizTalk Adapter Pack include:

· Feature improvements to address BizTalk adapter customer pain points besides achieving feature parity with the BizTalk adapters.

· Uniform access to varied LOB systems by standardizing on the WCF and the WCF LOB Adapter SDK. With uniform access comes a uniform design-time experience to browse and search LOB artifacts, a uniform adapter configuration experience and a uniform programming experience

· Programmability by providing users the choice of programming model to interface with the LOB, which includes the WCF channel model, WCF service model, ADO.NET model, WS-* compliant web services model or the BizTalk model

· LOB client decisions to invest in the right choice of the LOB client library wherever possible. This includes LOB client libraries with better supportability from the LOB companies and better feature support. The Oracle DB adapter uses ODP.NET (as opposed to the ODBC driver) and the SAP adapter uses the RFC SDK (as opposed to the SAP .NET connector)

· Reusability by building host-agnostic adapters that can be consumed from varied applications including BizTalk Server 2006 R2, SharePoint Server, SSIS and custom .NET applications

The BizTalk Adapter Pack “web-servicizes” the LOB system so to speak. Even further, it enables users to build “dynamic contracts” to the LOB constituting the artifact and operations that they are interested in as opposed to 1 big web service contract for the LOB.

The BizTalk Adapter Pack empowers customers to use one LOB adapter that would address their integration needs from various applications built on varied technologies. The BizTalk Adapter Pack currently contains 3 adapters which are as follows:

· Microsoft BizTalk Adapter 3.0 for mySAP Business Suite

· Microsoft BizTalk Adapter 3.0 for Oracle Database

· Microsoft BizTalk Adapter 3.0 for Siebel eBusiness Applications

You can download and try out the public Beta 2 bits of the BizTalk Adapter Pack from here!