Wss Adapter questions
These are some of the questions raised by early users of the WSS adapter. I assumed that people didn't want to see their names listed here, so I took the liberty and removed all the names and also rephrased some of the questions.
Q: What are the differences between the WSS adapter in 2006 which is available out of the box, and the WSS adapter for 2004 which could be downloaded from gotdotnet?
A: See my previous blog entry http://blogs.msdn.com/ahamza/archive/2005/07/27/443823.aspx At some point I will follow up in the blog with a detailed comparison of each feature.
Q: Can you use WSS adapter to archive Word/Excel docs contained in a SharePoint document libraries?
A: Yes, the new WSS Adapter can handle binary documents including Word/Excel docs. Just make sure that you: 1) use Passthrough pipelines on receive locations and send ports, and 2) you set Office Integration property to "No" on send ports and receive locations. Use CBR instead of an orchestration, it's much easier to make a mistake from an orchestration if you are using binary messages.
Q: Why would you use one pipeline over the other when using the WSS adapter?
A: Each pipeline has its own capabilities and features. The adapter does not care what pipeline is used, you will use one pipeline over the other based on the pipeline functionality that you need or don't need.
- XmlPipeline - knows to search for the appropriate XSD schema that matches the incoming/outoging XML document and it will suspend the message if no matching XSD schema is found (corrected August 03 - validation of the XML message against the XSD schema does not happen automatically, you will need a custom pipeline for that). It also knows to add/remove PI, handle different types of message encodings, etc. This pipeline will validate the message and reject any invalid or unkown message. Using this pipeline with binary messages (non-xml) will cause the messages to be suspended. The pipeline settings can be changed to alter some of these characteristics.
- Passthrough - this pipeline does NOT validate messages, it does not look for an XML schema, etc. This is the pipeline that you want to use with binary messages (or any message that can not be understood by BizTalk) like Word docs, PDF files, etc.
Q: The adapter "Windows SharePoint Services" raised an error message. Details "The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized." How can I fix this?
A: WSS Adapter runtime is hosted in a BizTalk host instance and it runs under the identity of the host instance. As a result the account for this host instance needs permissions to invoke the BTSharePointAdapterWS adapter web service as well as permissions to create/delete/update files in SharePoint.
Resolution:
1.Go to your SharePoint site, probably http://<MACHINENAME>/sites/<SiteName> or http://<MACHINENAME>/
Go to Site Settings
Go to Site Administration
Click on Manage site groups
Click on Contributors
Add Members...
Add <MACHINENAME>\Sharepoint Enabled Hosts
2. Now from Administrative Tools -> Computer Management, add <MACHINENAME>\<BTSHostUser> account to "Sharepoint Enabled Hosts" group
3. Restart BizTalk host instance from the Admin MMC
Q: I added the host instance account to SharePoint Enabled Hosts and I still get 401 access denied error. Is there anything else I need to do?
A: Restart the host instance process using BizTalk Administration Console.
Q: How to install BTSharePointAdapterWS.asmx web service?
A: BTSharePointAdapterWS is in fact the Wss Adapter web service. This is installed by Windows SharePoint Services Adapter Web Service feature under Additional Software (in Setup). This feature's configuration settings are under the "SharePoint Adapter" node in the BizTalk Server Configuration tool.
Q: I have installed WSS SP2, I upgraded IIS sites to ASP.NET 2.0 but BAS and WSS Adapter Web Service features are still disabled/grayed out. What am I missing?
A: If you have done all of the above and you still cannot install BAS or WSS Adapter features then the WSS language does not match the BizTalk language. You need to install the language pack for WSS ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E7EEC77D-4365-4B66-8E8D-9D079C509679&displaylang=en ) in order for BizTalk and WSS to use the same language.
