Using a SOAP adapter in a business process

Directory

Web Service Adapters

Using the SOAP adapter

SOAP Transport Properties

Using a SOAP adapter in a business process

WSE 2.0 Adapter

WCF adapters

Summarize

This month I'll take you into the exciting BizTalk Server 2006 World and introduce you to BizTalk Server 2006 support for the current Web services technology. You will learn how to use the existing SOAP and Web Service Enhancement (WSE) adapters and understand the Windows®communication Foundation (WCF) adapters that come with the upcoming Biztalk®server 2006 R2 version.

The build of BizTalk Server 2006 is based on a flexible messaging subsystem that improves the loosely linked messaging interactions between heterogeneous applications. The messaging layer provides many of the benefits of integration, such as message routing, schema transformation, and format conversion. At the core of the messaging layer is a SQL Server™ database called MessageBox. All messages processed by the messaging layer go through MessageBox for routing, tracking, and error handling. MessageBox's running principle is "leave no messages in the background", a feature that is critical to reliability supremacy. But to be fair, using this feature may backfire if it is more important for performance requirements.

By defining message subscriptions (also known as "Filters") in MessageBox, you can control how messages are routed between applications. The definition of a filter can be done either on the administrative console (the send port) or indirectly by defining a logical port in the business process. As shown in Figure 1, when a message is published, MESSAGEBOX evaluates the incoming message based on the subscription and passes the message to all the matching subscribers (send port or orchestration). This publish/subscribe architecture completely separates the receiver from the sender.

Figure 1BizTalk Message Delivery architecture

The interaction of BizTalk with the outside world is done through adapters. The adapter receives bytes in a specific transport mode and creates a new BizTalk message that is published to the MessageBox (see Figure 2) when the receive pipeline and the mapping (the XSLT transform) have an opportunity to perform an operation on the incoming message. The same is true for transmitting outgoing messages. When the mapping and send pipeline have an opportunity to perform an operation on an outgoing message, the adapter transmits the generated bytes to the transport mode. In BizTalk, these details are configured by sending and receiving ports.

Figure 2 BizTalk Internal ports

BizTalk supports one-way and two-way ports. At the receiving end, you can define a single receive port, receiving only messages without returning any content. You can also define a request-response receive port and send the response message back to the caller when the request is received. Also, on the sender side, you can define a one-way port or a requirement-response port.

BizTalk Server 2006 comes with a variety of adapters that support many transfer modes and protocols, several of which are designed specifically for soap and ws-*. In addition to soap and ws-*, BizTalk supports many communication mechanisms, one of its most attractive features. This makes BizTalk a focus for those systems that must balance the trade-off between maintaining legacy applications and investing in new services.

Web Service Adapters

BizTalk Server 2006 is integrated with soap and ws-* and needs to be implemented with the different Web service adapters listed in Figure 3. The SOAP adapters are shipped with BizTalk Server 2004 and later to support the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 (BP 1.1) message. If you need to support the ws-* protocol, you must use the WSE adapter that is available in the market, or wait for the Windows Communication Foundation adapter that is included in the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 version.

Figure3microsoft BizTalk Web Service adapters

Adapter	BizTalk Server 2004	BizTalk Server 2006	BizTalk Server 2006 R2
Soap	Including	Including	Including
WSE 2.0	Provide download	Download available (requires SP1)	Download available (requires SP1)
Wcf	does not include	does not include	Including