In very few days, we will release BizTalk360 version 8.9. As everyone is excited, I’m excited too as, in every release of BizTalk360, we constantly improve and include features based on the customer’s feedback and business needs. In the upcoming version, we have implemented a few features purely based on the customer’s feedback.

Here is the list of features which I’m going to cover in this blog:

1. PDF Download
2. Restore System Email XSLT Template
3. Monitoring IBMMQ and Azure Service Bus Queues using Message Age
4. Performance improvements

PDF Download

Based on the existing implementation in the Analytics reporting module, many of our customers requested the PDF download feature. We have implemented the PDF Download capability for the following modules:

• Graphical Flow (Tracking)
• Messaging Patterns
• Operations Dashboard
• Monitoring Dashboard
• Analytics Dashboard

In Graphical Flow (Tracking)

The user views the entire flow of the message from where it entered the BizTalk server to the point where it left the BizTalk Server environment. All the message flows are indicated by arrow marks between the nodes, which will provide a clear indication of the message transactions.

Say, in a message flow a message is not sent to the expected node; this will become clear in the Graphical Flow (Tracking) feature.

Example: The Viewer shows you what messages a service instance (pipeline or orchestration) sent and received, and details such as the URL, port, and party used. You can also see which preceding service instances handled the messages coming into the service instance you are currently viewing.

You can link back to these instances and see the messages coming into and going out of these instances.You can also see the subsequent service instances that received messages from the service instance you are currently viewing, and link forward to these instances to see the messages coming into and going out of these instances.

In other words, you can walk through the entire path of an activation message through your business process.

In such cases, the new PDF download implementation will be helpful to download the flow and escalate the problem to the required team.

To capture the full message pattern, you can choose the full-screen view. Along with the zoom in and zoom out capability, we have introduced a new option PDF download feature.

The PDF will get downloaded and be given the name of a pipeline of the selected port. Say for example, in the graphical flow, if you choose a Receive Port and select the download option, the PDF will be downloaded and be given the name of the Receive Port pipeline.

Messaging Patterns

As you are aware, the message patterns are the unique flows that get recorded for the message transfers. To capture a message flow, choose the full-screen view option. Along with the zoom in and zoom out options, the PDF download button will now be visible

When the user wants to see a message flow, we display it as a graphical pattern with the artifacts involved.

Example: A message can be received by a receive port, split up and processed in separate orchestrations, after which the processed messages are being sent to external processes/systems. To capture a unique message flow and use it for reference in the future, the PDF download will be helpful.

Messaging Patterns will be downloaded with the name of the message pattern.

Operations Dashboard

BizTalk360 has a capability to add default widgets and create your own custom widgets. In such cases, you have configured important widgets into the dashboard.

Even though you have an option to make the dashboard as global, when you want to share within the team you would have to make screenshots. To avoid creating screenshots again, we have implemented the PDF download option.

When you navigate to the Operations Dashboard, at the top right corner, next to the Refresh button, the PDF button will be available.

When you download the Operations Dashboard, the PDF will get downloaded with the name of the dashboard.

Monitoring Dashboard

You may get the status of an alarm via notifications from BizTalk360 whenever the port goes down. You can also receive the complete status of the monitored artifacts, with the help of a regular health check alarm for each hour. But, when you want to share the immediate status of the alarm the PDF download option will be helpful.

The download option will be enabled, similar to the Messaging Patterns for the Operations Dashboard. You can choose the full-screen view option. Along with the zoom in and zoom out buttons, the PDF download button will now be visible.

As seen in the messaging pattern, when you download the monitoring dashboard, the PDF will be saved with the alarm name which you were viewing.

Analytics Dashboard

Like the Operations Dashboard, in the Analytics Dashboard, at the top right corner, next to the Refresh button, the PDF download button will be available.

When you download the PDF, it will get downloaded with the name of the dashboard.

Restore System XSLT

We constantly improve the email templates based on the customer requests and we provide the templates directly to the customers. After that, we make the changes on the default email template in the very next release.

To make use of the newly improved email template in both default and custom email templates which are already created, until now people had to update their template(s) manually. While doing the manual changes, there may be a chance of misconfiguring the template. To avoid the manual changes, we brought this new capability “Restore System XSLT”, directly from the user interface.

Monitor with Message Age

Another most requested capability is monitoring IBMMQ and Azure Service bus queues with message age.

Message age is the time a message exists in a Queue. Using the message age parameter, you can monitor the queue messages along with the time messages exist in a queue.

In a real-time scenario, a message should be processed and send out, as the queues serve as first in first out. If it is not being processed and still pending in the queues over a particular period, you will get notified with the implementation of Message Age parameter.

We have implemented Message Age parameter as an additional monitoring filter option, in two places.

1. Azure Service Bus queues

2. IBM MQ

As of now, using the Message Age parameter, you can monitor the message age from few seconds to 24 hours Say, for example, if you want to monitor a queue using the message age parameter, you can monitor the queue messages along with the time of the message when it is created.

Performance Improvement

For the table “b360_BizTalkDB_Tbl_sizes”, every minute a stored procedure in BizTalk360 will clear a table of old records and insert new records.

One of our customers started facing problems, that due to high CPU usage because of that query is being executed every minute. Also, while deleting an entry, a full table scan is done, every time the query is executed. In an environment, this causes 2 seconds of CPU usage and half a million of I/O’s per query. Also, there were duplicate entries in the table for different regional settings.

The cleaning takes place on both the MessageBox and the Tracking database. It causes 4 statements per minute, like the one above, and it leads to high CPU usage.

We found that a table index is missing for the table b360_BizTalkDB_Tbl_sizes. So, we have created an index for the table and also tuned the query for making entries. This will help to reduce the CPU usage.

Conclusion

We always keep track of our Feedback Portal and take up the valid suggestions and feedback.  Now, it is your turn to fill your business scenarios and features you are expecting to have in BizTalk360; please fill this questionnaire. Your valuable suggestions will help us to prioritize the next set of feature for upcoming releases.

Author: Sivaramakrishnan Arumugam

Sivaramakrishnan is our Support Engineer with quite a few certifications under his belt. He has been instrumental in handling the customer support area. He believes Travelling makes happy of anyone. View all posts by Sivaramakrishnan Arumugam

The post BizTalk360 Improvements and Enhancements Version 8.9 appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

To end these week contributions, tomorrow is national holiday in Portugal, BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack community project for BizTalk Server 2016 got a new update. A new component that you can use in your custom BizTalk Server Send pipelines is now available: Remove XML Namespace Pipeline Component.

Remove XML Namespace Pipeline Component

The XML Remove Namespace pipeline component was developed in the old days by Johan Hedberg for BizTalk Server 2006 – you can check the original post here – that I now migrate to BizTalk Server 2016 with his permission and it can be used to remove XML namespaces from XML documents inside custom pipelines.

This has the availability to transform the root of the message from this:

<ns0:Blah xmlns:ns0="http://RemoveXmlNamespace.BTS.BlahMessage">

Into this:

<Blah>

As Johan mention in his original post, you shouldn’t remove the namespace from the messages, however, we don’t leave in a perfect world and we need to deal with legacy systems and sometimes they required, for unknown reasons for me, that we deliver messages without namespace.

To use this pipeline component in your projects you just copy the “RemoveXmlNamespace.PipelineComponents.dll” file into “Pipeline Components“ folder that exists in BizTalk Server Installation directory: “..Program Files (x86)Microsoft BizTalk Server <version>Pipeline Components” on every server.

You do not need to add a custom pipeline component to be used by the BizTalk Runtime to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC).

What is BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack?

BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack is a set of custom pipeline components (libraries) with several custom pipeline components that can be used in received and sent pipelines, which will provide an extension of BizTalk out-of-the-box pipeline capabilities.

The project is available on BizTalk Server Open Source Community repository on GitHub (https://github.com/BizTalkCommunity) and everyone can contribute with new pipeline components that can be extended or improve the existing BizTalk Server capabilities.

At the moment it is only available for BizTalk Server 2016 but it will soon be compiled and available for previous versions of the product.

Where to download it?

You can download BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack from GitHub here:
BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack
GitHub

Author: Sandro Pereira

Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community. View all posts by Sandro Pereira

The post BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack: Remove XML Namespace Pipeline Component appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Welcome back to my blog post series “BizTalk Server Tips and Tricks” for developers, administrators or business users. Not all tips and tricks are sophisticated or quite robust and ingenious, some of them are quite simple. Some of them are in front of us all the time without us noticing, this is one of these cases.

Today there is a lot more information than in the past, but normally when we start BizTalk Server tutorials about schemas, they tend to say that if you want to specify how many times a record or an element will occur, you should configure the below values:

• The Max Occurs property to specify the maximum occurrences of this node (record or element). The default value is ‘1’ and cannot be less than the Min Occurs property
• The Min Occurs property to specify the minimum occurrences of this node. The default value is ‘1’ and cannot be greater than the Max Occurs property

What this type of tutorial also tells you, is that if you want to specify that a specific node can appear an unlimited number of times, at the Max Occurs property, you should type the value: “unbounded”

So, we tend to manually write the word “unbounded”, each time we want to set a node to appear an unlimited number of times… I think, I can write this word better than my personal name, so many are the times I’ve written it over the years. But to be honest, this can be a little time consuming. Especially if we type it wrongly, newbies need to remember this word – there are other words with the same meaning as unlimited – and sometimes is just a little boring.

Well, guess what, if you are at this point of the post wondering what is the alternative, in the future you should spend a little time reading the description of property inside Visual Studio; the alternative has been there in front of you all the time:

• Maximum Occurrences of this node. Its value should always be greater than or equal to minOccurs of this node. Use ‘unbounded’ or ‘*’ (asterisk) to indicate unlimited occurrences. The default value is ‘1’.

Which means that if we type * (asterisk), this will be automatically translated to “unbounded”.

Quick, simple and practical

Stay tuned for new tips and tricks!

Author: Sandro Pereira

Sandro Pereira is an Azure MVP and works as an Integration consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. View all posts by Sandro Pereira

The post BizTalk Server Tips and Tricks: Another way to set unlimited occurrences on schema elements appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform?

Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.

If you want to receive these updates weekly, then don’t forget to Subscribe!

Feedback

Hope this would be helpful. Please feel free to reach out to me with your feedback and questions.

The post Microsoft Integration Weekly Update: October 8, 2018 appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

When I say “PaaS” what comes to mind? If you’re like most people I talk to, you think of public cloud platforms for modern web apps. So I’ll forgive you if you didn’t realize that things are different now!

The first generation of PaaS products had a few things in common. They were public cloud only. You had to build apps with the runtime constraints in mind. They only ran statelesss web apps. Linux was the only runtime. When Cloud Foundry first came out, it checked most of those boxes. But over the years, Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) evolved to do much more.

Many people still think of those first-generation PaaS constraints when considering PCF, and specifically, the Pivotal Application Service (PAS). So, I thought it’d be fun to look at non-traditional workloads. In this brief five-part series, I’m going to show off the following scenarios:

• Part 1 – Deploying and running Docker images
• Part 2 – Setting up TCP routable services
• Part 3 – Running batch and scheduled jobs
• Part 4 – Configuring data streaming apps
• Part 5 – Deploying .NET Framework apps to Windows Server

Deploying and running Docker images

Most Cloud Foundry users depend on buildpacks. Developers push source code, and the buildpack pulls in dependencies, frameworks, and runtimes, then builds a tarball that’s deployed as an OCI-compatible container in Cloud Foundry.  One major benefit of the buildpacks model is that the platform brings the root file system to your app. You’re not responsible for finding secure base images or maintaining that “layer” of the stack. But all that said, some folks like using Docker images as their packaging unit whether manually created (don’t do that) or as the output from a continuous integration pipeline.

It doesn’t matter if Cloud Foundry builds the container or you send in a Docker image, it’s all treated the same by the platform. At runtime, the orchestrator executes all containers using runC, the same spec used by Docker and Kubernetes. Let’s see this in action.

You can try this for free on Pivotal Web Services if you don’t have a Cloud Foundry available. I’m using a different environment, but they all behave the same. That’s the point! After you cf login to Cloud Foundry, it’s time to push a container.

How about we start with a Node.js web app. Here’s an Express app built by the folks at Bitnami. We can actually push this to Cloud Foundry with a single command.

cf push nodedocker --docker-image bitnami/node-example:0.0.1 -i 2 -m 128M

In that command, notice a couple things. First, I’m using the –docker-image flag. Since I’m hitting a public image in the public Docker Hub, no credentials or anything are needed. PCF also works with private images, and private registries. Otherwise, it’s a standard command that asks for a single instance, and 128M of memory for each instance. Within ten seconds, you’ll have two routable instances ready to process traffic.

Seriously. That’s amazing. And PCF doesn’t “mess with” the image. Whatever layers are in your Docker image are what run in Cloud Foundry. One thing PCF *does* do is volume mount a directory that contains a unique certificate for the container. This regularly-rotated credential (up to hourly!) is used for things like mTLS. You can see it by SSH-ing into the container and doing printenv or browsing the file system. Yes, you can actually SSH into containers whether built by the platform or via Docker images. No black boxes here.

Deploying an app’s only half the story. Does PCF treat the running app the same way if it was packaged as a Docker image? Yup. Jumping to the PCF Apps Manager UX, you see our running app.

If you look closely, you see that we indicate the app type, in this case, that it’s from a Docker image.

More importantly, the platform bestows all the operational goodness on this app as any other. For example, all the logs from each app instance are collected and aggregated.

You can add environment variables. Configure auto-scaling. Monitor app and container health metrics. Bind to marketplace services. All the things that make PCF a great runtime for apps make it a great runtime for apps packaged as Docker images.

So try it out yourself. If you’re building custom apps, PCF is a great destination regardless of how you want to ship code. Stay tuned tomorrow for fun network routing demonstration.

Categories: Cloud, Cloud Foundry, DevOps, Docker, General Architecture, Microservices, Node.js

The post Wait, THAT runs on Pivotal Cloud Foundry? Part 1 – Docker images appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Hi there! It’s time to upgrade your BizTalk360 installation! We are here with our next release of BizTalk360, v8.9. As promised, this release also comes up with a bunch of exciting new features, enhancements and of course some bug fixes.

The series of blogs, explaining the different features coming up in v8.9, have already been released. But, to make it easy for our customers, we thought it would be nice to give a brief description of all these features in a single place. This way it would be easy to get the real big picture of this new release.

As per the below quotes,

“The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them- preferably in unexpected and helpful ways”

                                                                                                                  – Richard Branson

The features are added to the product based on the customer feedback and suggestions. We understand the customer needs and add them to the product to make the product as suitable as possible for the user. 

Come on, let’s jump in to get the list!

User Access Policy enhancements

In the User Access Policy section, the Application access section has new capabilities. Initially, it was a list of applications which needed to be checked for providing access to the Normal Users/Groups. But then, what about the newly deployed applications? Every time when a new application was deployed, the Admin would need to scroll down the entire list to check for the new applications and then provide access. This was very time-consuming.
Now, to ease the process, we have provided different rules for configuring the access. But then, only one rule can be applied at a time. The different rules include:

• Grant Access by Applications
• Grant Access to All Applications
• Wildcard Search
• Grant Access to Application groups

Grant Access to All Applications

As the name denotes, enabling this rule will provide access to all the available applications for the Normal Users/Groups. The user will automatically be granted access to all the newly deployed applications.

Wildcard Search

This enables users to select the options from the wildcard operator drop down. Once this rule is configured, the user will have access to all the applications matching this wildcard. The user will automatically be given access to the newly created applications that match the wildcard.

Grant Access to Application Groups

With this new capability, you can create Application Groups and map the applications to that group. Once the user is given access to the Application group, he/she can access all the applications which are mapped to that group.

Grant Access by Applications

For persisting the existing configuration data, we have another rule available: ‘Grant Access by Application’.  Once the upgrade is completed, this will be the default rule which is selected for existing users. The only difference between this configuration and the other new rules, is that when Grant Access by Applications is configured, newly applications created will not automatically be given access as in the other rules.

Stop Alerts for Maintenance during business holidays

If a user sets up multiple maintenance windows, they need to configure the business holidays individually. It will take much of your time, to configure them for every single environment in BizTalk360. To reduce the time and ease the maintenance configuration for the users, the capability to add business holiday calendars has been introduced.

These business holiday calendars can be mapped during maintenance window setup. This new configuration section is introduced in the Monitoring Notification settings section as “Configure Business Holidays”.

In the Stop Alerts for Maintenance settings page, a new section is introduced to configure the business holiday calendars. All the configured calendars with Status enabled will be displayed in the “Select Business Holiday Calendar” drop down list. A user can select the desired calendar and use it for a maintenance window. During the business holiday, a maintenance window will be active.

The users can also exclude certain alarms during the maintenance. This means, that, except the selected alarms, other alarms will undergo maintenance. This capability is very useful in situations where administrators don’t want to receive alerts during the weekends except for few specific alarms.

Web Endpoint monitoring improvements

From 8.9 version on, BizTalk360 Web Endpoint authentication is extended to support:

Let’s have a look at the improvements in these areas.

Basic Access Authentication

This is a method for an HTTP user agent to provide a user name and password when making a request. To unauthenticated requests, the server should return a response whose header contains a HTTP 401 Unauthorized status and a WWW-Authenticate field. In the BizTalk Admin Console, an HTTP endpoint can provision Basic authentication with a username and password

Certificate Authentication

In BizTalk360, the authentication type of Basic or Windows, along with the client certificate thumbprint, is configured in the Authorization section of Web Endpoint monitoring.  

Azure Services Authentication

To be able to use Azure Services Authentication, a Service Principal must be configured in Azure. A Service Principal is an application within Azure Active Directory whose authentication tokens can be used as the client Id, client secret, and tenant fields (the subscription can be independently recovered from your Azure account details).

Additional content types

BizTalk360 8.9 extends the support to additional content types in request and response objects:

1. SOAP (1.2) Content Type – “application/soap+XML” is a SOAP 1.2 content type which is added to the list. With this additional content type, SOAP V1.2 protocol is supported in web endpoint monitoring. The user can configure the XPath conditions to monitor the SOAP 1.2 endpoints, based on the results of the execution.
2. Custom Content Type – When Endpoint Request/Response content types are not supported by BizTalk360, the Web Endpoint throws a HTTP 415 Unsupported Media Type. To prevent this from happening, you can configure Custom Content types. 

Extended Import/Export Configuration

In version 8.9, we added support for import and export of the following sections:

1. Knowledge Base
   • Service Instances
   • ESB Exceptions
   • Event Logs
   • Throttling Data
2. BizTalk Reports
3.  Dashboards
   • Operation (Default & Custom Dashboards)
   • Analytics (Default & Custom Dashboards)
   • EDI Dashboards
   • ESB Dashboards
4. Custom Widgets

The details of this feature can be found here.

Additional columns filter capability

Grid columns in BizTalk360 are getting a fresh look. You can customize the column headers which are most important to your business scenario.

Grid columns can be dynamically removed or added based on the user preference. As per the settings in the configuration section, columns will be aligned and displayed in the grid view. These customized column settings can be saved for future reference as well. We are sure, this capability will add more value when the administrator is looking for the instances/messages based on various conditions.

As an initial phase, this implementation has been done in the following areas in BizTalk360:

1. Message Box Queries
2. Graphical Flow (Tracking)
3. Electronic Data Interchange

BizTalk360 allows saving as many patterns as the user wants. To search the messages based on different scenarios, admins prefer different filter conditions to validate. In those situations, BizTalk360 allows to save different query filters and keeps them for future use. You can also download the customized column data using the Export to Excel capability.

Centralized Advanced Event Log viewer performance improvement

In our previous versions, up to v8.8, Event Log collection logic is not segregated based per server. To enable the Event Log collection, it is bound to the BizTalk environment and not on an individual server level. However, the user has control on configuring the sources based on the need.

In the new version of BizTalk360, users can control the Event Log collection according to individual servers. As an administrator, you know the value of each source which needs most considerations. So, there is an option as well in BizTalk360 to configure the BizTalk & SQL server sources separately.

Using these settings, you can customize and narrow down your Event Log search.

PowerShell Notification Channel

In our earlier versions, the users were already able to send notifications to specific notification channels (E.g.: Slack, ServiceNow, Webhook, Teams). Now the user can configure PowerShell scripts in the Notification Channel while configuring an alarm.

More Enhancements in BizTalk360 v8.9

Besides the above mentioned features, we have also brought a number of enhancements to existing features.

Monitor queues for message age – We have enhanced the option to monitor the queues with message ages (time of message till it exists in the queue) for IBM MQ and Service Bus Queues.

Notifications grouped by Error Description – Previously, Service instances were grouped by Error Code in the alert emails. Now, there is a new setting “Enable Group by Description” introduced to group the service instances based on the Error Description to get full insight about your errored service instances.

New filter option in ESB Exception portal – There is a new filter option “Service Name” introduced in the ESB Exception Data query builder. This will enable users to perform extensive search and get the desired results.

Restore XSLT templates – Whenever we make any improvements to the default email template there is no option for the users to restore the changes from the GUI. This makes them to manually copy/paste the XSLT from the database to utilize the new changes. To avoid the manual intervention, a new option has been provided “Restore System XSLT” to restore the changes from GUI.

PDF download available in more areas – PDF download capability is not new in BizTalk360. We have provided this option in few other areas of the application, to download the reports, dashboards and message flows from the GUI. This option is provided in Operation, Monitoring & Analytics Dashboards, Graphical Flow (Tracking) and Messaging Patterns.

Group your Logic Apps by and monitor on Resource Groups – In the earlier versions, Logic Apps are not grouped by Resource Group name. There was an issue to display the Logic Apps which are created in different Resource Groups with the same name. With the introduction of “Resource Group” column, Logic Apps are grouped by Resource Group in every single configured Azure subscription.

Multiple installer improvements – We have enhanced the BizTalk360 installer in v8.9 in few areas:

• Single credentials during upgrade – Only one set of credentials (User Name, Password) will be asked during the upgrade process, in case the same credentials have been used for all the installed components
• SQL Authentication – BizTalk360 will now support SQL Authentication for upgrade

Finally, of course, they are a number of bug fixes as well. Kindly refer the Release Notes for the complete details.

Conclusion

We always monitor the feedback portal and take up the suggestions and feedback. Now we would like to request you, our customers, to please take the time to fill this questionnaire to help us prioritize the next upcoming feature tasks, to let us know what are your main pain points and help us to further improve the product.

Why not give BizTalk360 a try! It takes about 10 minutes to install on your BizTalk environments and you can witness and check the security and productivity of your own BizTalk Environments. Get started with the free 30 days trial. Happy monitoring with BizTalk360!

Author: Praveena Jayanarayanan

I am working as Senior Support Engineer at BizTalk360. I always believe in team work leading to success because “We all cannot do everything or solve every issue. ‘It’s impossible’. However, if we each simply do our part, make our own contribution, regardless of how small we may think it is…. together it adds up and great things get accomplished.” View all posts by Praveena Jayanarayanan

The post It’s time to upgrade – Here is BizTalk360 v8.9 appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Platform-as-a-Service products typically run web apps. That is, apps that accept HTTP traffic and listen on ports 80, 8080 or 443. As you survey the landscape today, you’ll find that’s still the case in the most popular public cloud application runtimes. That’s not a bad thing, but sometimes you have workloads with different routing needs. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate TCP Routing in Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), and show Redis running directly in the platform.

As a reminder, this is the 2nd post in a series about “unexpected” workloads running on PCF.

• Part 1 – Deploying and running Docker images
• Part 2 – Setting up TCP routable services
• Part 3 – Running batch and scheduled jobs
• Part 4 – Configuring data streaming apps
• Part 5 – Deploying .NET Framework apps to Windows Server

About TCP Routing in PCF

TCP Routing has been part of Cloud Foundry for two years now. Basically, TCP Routing lets your app handle traffic over non-HTTP TCP protocols. This is valuable for custom-built apps or packaged software that communicate with binary payloads or specialized transports.

By default, custom-built apps are set to always listen on port 8080 in Cloud Foundry. The buildpack process (mentioned in part 1 of the series) configures that, although you can change this behavior. Even if your app does listen on port 8080, TCP Routing makes it easy to expose a non-HTTP port to the outside world via network address translation.

Assuming your Cloud Foundry admins configured TCP Routing in your environment(s), you can set up this type of per-app routing entirely via self-service.

Deploying a TCP routable workload

Instead of demonstrating with an app I wrote myself, I thought it’d be more fun to deploy a well-known software product. Enter Redis! Redis is a wildly-popular key-value store, and there are many ways to install it. One of the easiest options is the Docker image. Note that Redis typically exposes access over port 6379. When deploying Docker images to Cloud Foundry, the port defined in the EXPOSE directive is what’s actually exposed by Cloud Foundry app container. I didn’t know that until this week!

After logging into my PCF environment, I ran the cf domains command to see what routable domains were available to me.

I’ve got the “standard” domain for my regular web apps (here, apps.pcfone.io), a domain for TCP routing (tcp.apps.pcfone.io) and one for private traffic (apps.internal) that we’ll mess with shortly.

I started by pushing a Redis image to PCF. I’m purposely using the –no-route command to ensure it doesn’t get a default web route in the apps.pcfone.io domain.

cf push redisdocker --docker-image redis -i 1 -m 256M --no-route -u process

After about ten seconds, the container is up and running. Notice however, that it’s currently not routable.

Let’s change that. Now, because all apps sit behind the same edge router and TCP routes don’t have a path component, I can’t have two apps listening on the same TCP port. So, there’s a good chance that the default Redis port fo 6379 is already in use somewhere. That’s cool; we can tell PCF to assign a random port at the edge route that forwards traffic to port 6379 on the app container.

cf map-route redisdocker tcp.apps.pcfone.io --random-port

The result? I get a TCP route assigned on port 10011.

Again, note that the app container is still listening on 6379, because that’s what was set by the Docker image at deploy time. But through network address translation, the external facing port is a different value. Let’s prove that Redis is actually running and addressable.

I spun up the redis-cli and issued a command.

Ok, clearly it’s reachable via the public Internet over a non-HTTP connection. That’s neat. I did a LITTLE more with Redis than that, by also adding and retrieving a key.

With this pattern, my apps running in PCF (or anywhere) can send requests to PCF-hosted software that handles all kinds of payloads and protocols. But what if you don’t want these workloads to be Internet accessible?

Setting up private TCP routing

The above demo is cool, but you might not like having your cache, MQTT bus, or whatever, exposed to public traffic. This is where the relatively-new container-to-container networking is pretty darn neat.

By default, app instances in Cloud Foundry talk to each other through the shared router. That’s not awful, but for performance reasons, or to access private services, you may want to communicate directly with another app container. With polyglot service discovery now part of PCF, it’s easy to do this via DNS, versus hard-coded container addresses. Let me show you.

First, I removed the publicly-accessible TCP route from my Redis instance.

Now, you can no longer reach it. Next up, I wanted to map my Redis instance to the apps.internal domain that’s ONLY accessible within a Cloud Foundry.

cf map-route redisdocker apps.internal --hostname redisdocker

Because we’re not dealing with any extra NAT action, I can directly hit Redis on port 6379. I built a Node.js app that connects to Redis, adds a key, and reads a key. I set the connection details to the internal domain and standard port.

var options = {  host: "redisdocker.apps.internal",  port: 6379}
var redis = require("redis"), client = redis.createClient(options);

Then I pushed this app to PCF with a –no-start command so that I could set up connectivity between my app and Redis. Apps can’t automatically reach other apps on the apps.internal domain unless we give permission. It’s easy to do.  Via the Cloud Foundry CLI, I can create, delete, and list network policies. A network policy determines which apps can directly talk to each other (without going through the router), over which port and protocol.

cf add-network-policy demo-app --destination-app redisdocker --protocol tcp --port 6379

Notice that in that command, all I said was that one app (demo-app) could talk to another app (redisdocker). I didn’t have to map IP addresses, or anything like that. As app instances scale in and out, there’s no need to change the policies to reflect that. That’s a considerate UX.

After executing the above command, my Node.js app (demo-app) could “see” the redisdocker app instance. And notice that I’ve allowed traffic to the default Redis port, 6379.

With that policy in place, I loaded the Node.js app, and it directly routed requests over port 6379 to my Redis instance.

Unlike most PaaS-like products, PCF offers TCP routing over non-HTTP channels. While you may still (wisely) choose to run certain workloads—clustered services, apps that need multiple IPs exposed per container, or workloads with complex persistence needs—in an environment outside of PCF, it’s useful to know that you can leverage PCF to host and orchestrate a wide variety of publicly or privately routable workloads. Keep an eye out tomorrow for the next post, where we investigate batch jobs.

Categories: Cloud, Cloud Foundry, Node.js, Pivotal

The post Wait, THAT runs on Pivotal Cloud Foundry? Part 2 – TCP-routable services appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

And yes, this is just another “Login failed for user” SQL Server WCF-Adapter related error. In the past I wrote about a similar topic BizTalk WCF-SQL Error:

This time the error message, the cause, and the solution are slightly different. This time while trying to communicate to a brand-new SQL Server server/database to insert date on a table thru BizTalk WCF-SQL adapter I got the following error:

Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.ConnectionException: Login failed for user ‘BTSHostSrvc’. —> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Login failed for user ‘BTSHostSrvc’.

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds..ctor(DbConnectionPoolIdentity identity, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, SqlCredential credential, Object providerInfo, String newPassword, SecureString newSecurePassword, Boolean redirectedUserInstance, SqlConnectionString userConnectionOptions, SessionData reconnectSessionData, DbConnectionPool pool, String accessToken, Boolean applyTransientFaultHandling, SqlAuthenticationProviderManager sqlAuthProviderManager)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnectionFactory.CreateConnection(DbConnectionOptions options, DbConnectionPoolKey poolKey, Object poolGroupProviderInfo, DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnection owningConnection, DbConnectionOptions userOptions)

at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.CreatePooledConnection(DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnection.

In the event viewer the message is pretty much the same:

A message sent to adapter “WCF-Custom” on send port “STAGING_BULK_SQL_WCf_SEND” with URI “mssql://SQLSRV/ /ESBAsync” is suspended.

Error details: Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.ConnectionException: Login failed for user ‘DOMAIN BTSHostSrvc’. —> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Login failed for user DOMAIN BTSHostSrvc’.

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds..ctor(DbConnectionPoolIdentity identity, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, SqlCredential credential, Object providerInfo, String newPassword, SecureString newSecurePassword, Boolean redirectedUserInstance, SqlConnectionString userConnectionOptions, SessionData reconnectSessionData, DbConnectionPool pool, String accessToken, Boolean applyTransientFaultHandling, SqlAuthenticationProviderManager sqlAuthProviderManager)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnectionFactory.CreateConnection(DbConnectionOptions options, DbConnectionPoolKey poolKey, Object poolGroupProviderInfo, DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnection owningConnection, DbConnectionOptions userOptions)

at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.CreatePooledConnection(DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnection owningObject, DbConnectionOptions options, DbConnectionPoolKey poolKey, DbConnectionOptions userOptions)

at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.CreateObject(DbConnection owningObject, DbConnectionOptions userOptions, DbConnectionInternal oldConnection)

at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.UserCreateRequest(DbConnection owningObject, DbConnectionOptions userOptions, DbConnectionInternal oldConnection)

at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.TryGetConnection(DbConnection owningObject, UInt32 waitForMultipleObjectsTimeout, Boolean allowCreate, Boolean onlyOneCheckConnection, DbConnectionOptions userOptions, DbConnectionInternal& connection)

at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.TryGetConnection(DbConnection owningObject, TaskCompletionSource`1 retry, DbConnectionOptions userOptions, DbConnectionInternal& connection)

at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.TryGetConnection(DbConnection owningConnection, TaskCompletionSource`1 retry, DbConnectionOptions userOptions, DbConnectionInternal oldConnection, DbConnectionInternal& connection)

at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionInternal.TryOpenConnectionInternal(DbConnection outerConnection, DbConnectionFactory connectionFactory, TaskCompletionSource`1 retry, DbConnectionOptions userOptions)

at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionClosed.TryOpenConnection(DbConnection outerConnection, DbConnectionFactory connectionFactory, TaskCompletionSource`1 retry, DbConnectionOptions userOptions)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.TryOpenInner(TaskCompletionSource`1 retry)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.TryOpen(TaskCompletionSource`1 retry)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.Open()

at Microsoft.Adapters.Sql.SqlAdapterConnection.OpenConnection()

— End of inner exception stack trace —

Server stack trace:

at Microsoft.Adapters.Sql.SqlAdapterConnection.OpenConnection()

at Microsoft.Adapters.Sql.ASDKConnection.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.Design.ConnectionPool.GetConnection(Guid clientId, TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.Design.ConnectionPool.GetConnectionHandler[TConnectionHandler](Guid clientId, TimeSpan timeout, MetadataLookup metadataLookup, String& connectionId)

at Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.Channels.AdapterRequestChannel.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Runtime.OneWayOperationSendPortRequestChannel`1.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open()

Exception rethrown at [0]:

at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.HandleReturnMessage(IMessage reqMsg, IMessage retMsg)

at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)

at System.ServiceModel.ICommunicationObject.Open()

at Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Runtime.WcfClient`2.GetChannel[TChannel](IBaseMessage bizTalkMessage, ChannelFactory`1& cachedFactory)

at Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Runtime.WcfClient`2.SendMessage(IBaseMessage bizTalkMessage)

MessageId: {84B22A22-13F7-47C7-91B5-A863E64E268E}

Cause

Once again, sometimes is not quite true, the cause of the problem is simple to diagnose, and the error message gives a very good intel in the cause of the problem.

This problem occurs because the user account that you used to access the database, in my case the BizTalk Host Instance Account, don’t have permissions to connect… the SQL Server or SQL Server instance.

Just to be clear, this is not having permission to insert, read or event full permission to do operation on a specific database, that is completely different – I check all of that and the user have the correct access/permission. What I forget was to give access to connect to the SQL Server/SQL Server Instance.

Solution

To solve this issue, you must give access to the user, in my case BizTalk Host Instance Account to connect to the SQL Server and for that, you must:

• Open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to your server.
• In the Object Explorer, expand the “Security” folder under the server.
• Right click on the “Logins” folder and choose “New Login…”
• Add the username or group in the format “DomainUserNameOrGroup”

• Choose the “Securables” tab and make sure that you grant “Connect SQL” permission to the SQL Server/SQL Server instance

• Click “OK” and your user will be created and have access to connect to your SQL Server.

Author: Sandro Pereira

Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community. View all posts by Sandro Pereira

The post BizTalk WCF-SQL Error: Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.ConnectionException: Login failed for user appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

So far in this series of posts, we’ve seen that Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) runs a lot more than just web applications. Not every app has a user-facing front-end component. Some of your systems run in the background or on a schedule and perform a variety of important tasks. In this post, I’ll take a look at how to deploy background workers, on-demand batch tasks, and scheduled jobs.

This is the third in a five part series of posts:

Deploying and running background workers

Pivotal Cloud Foundry makes it easy to run workers that don’t have a routable address. These background jobs might listen to a database and respond to data changes, or respond to messages in a work queue. Let’s demonstrate the latter. 

I built a .NET Core console app that’s responsible for pulling “loan” records from RabbitMQ and processing them. You can built these background jobs is any programming language supported by Cloud Foundry.

What’s nice is that background jobs have access to all the useful PCF capabilities that web apps do. One such capability? Service Brokers! Devs love using Service Brokers to provision and access backing services. My background job needs access to RabbitMQ and I don’t want to hard-code any connection details. No big deal. I first spun up an on-demand RabbitMQ instance via the PCF Service Broker.

My .NET Core app uses the Steeltoe Service Connector (and the RabbitMQ .NET Client) to load service broker connection info and talk to my instance.

static void Main(string[] args){            
//pull service broker configuration            
var builder = new ConfigurationBuilder()
.AddEnvironmentVariables()
.AddCloudFoundry();
var configuration = builder.Build();
//get our fully loaded service 
var services = new ServiceCollection();
services.AddRabbitMQConnection(configuration);
var provider = services.BuildServiceProvider();
ConnectionFactory f = provider.GetService<ConnectionFactory>();
//connect to RMQ
using (var connection = f.CreateConnection())
using (var channel = connection.CreateModel()) 
{
channel.QueueDeclare(queue: "loans", durable: true, exclusive: false, autoDelete: false, arguments: null);
var consumer = new EventingBasicConsumer(channel);
//fire up when a new message comes in
consumer.Received += (model, ea) => {
var body = ea.Body;
var message = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(body);
Console.WriteLine("[x] Received loan data: {0}", message);
};                
channel.BasicConsume(queue: "loans", autoAck: true, consumer: consumer); 
Console.ReadLine();            
}        
}

Apps deployed to Cloud Foundry are typically accompanied by a YAML manifest. You can provide the parameters on the CLI, but versioned, source-controlled manifests are a better way to go. For these background jobs, the manifests are simple. Note two key things: the no-route parameter is “true” so that we don’t get a route assigned, and the health-check-type is set to “process” so that the orchestrator monitors process availability and doesn’t try to ping a non-existent web endpoint. Also notice that I bound my app to the previously-created RabbitMQ service instance.

---  
applications:
- name: core-demo-background    
memory: 256M    
no-route: true    
health-check-type: process    
services:
- seroter-rmq

After a quick cf push, my background app was running, and bound to the RabbitMQ instance.

This job quietly sits and waits for work to do. What’s neat is this can also take advantage of PCF’s autoscale capability, and scale by monitoring RabbitMQ queue depth, for example. For now, one instance is plenty. I logged into RabbitMQ and sent in a couple sample “loan” messages.

Sure enough, when I viewed the aggregated application logs for my background job, I saw the content of each read message printed out. 

These sorts of workers are a useful part of most systems, and PCF offers a resilient, manageable place to run them.

Deploying and running on-demand batch tasks

How many useful, random scripts do your system administrators have sitting around? You know, the ones that create users, reset demo environments, or purge FTP shares. Instead of having those scripts buried on administrator desktops, you can run these one-off batch jobs in PCF.

I created another .NET Core console application. This one pretends to sweep expired files from a shared folder. I deployed this application to PCF with a –no-start command since I want to trigger it on demand.

cf push --no-start

Now, to trigger the job, I need to know the start command. This depends on how you deployed it. Since I used the .NET Core buildpack, I want to start up the app one time to discover how PCF starts up the app.

That command showed me where the .NET Core executable lives in the container. I stopped the app again, and switched over the “Tasks” view in the PCF Apps Manager interface. I can do all these things via the CLI as well, but I’m a sucker for a nice UX. There’s a “run task” button that lets me define a one-off task definition.

Here I gave the task a name, pasted the start command I found above, and that was it! When I hit, “run”, PCF instantiated a new container instance and shut down the container when the task was complete. And that’s what I saw. There was a log entry indicating a successful job run, and the application logs showed the output of the task. Nice!

This is a great option for one-off jobs and scripts. Consolidate them in PCF, and get all the availability and auditing you need.

Deploying and running scheduled jobs

Finally, some of those one-off jobs may not be as one-off as you thought! Instead of asking your admin to trigger a task once a day to purge expired files, how about you schedule the job to run on a schedule? 

PCF also offers a scheduling component to trigger tasks (or API calls!) on a recurring basis. On the same “tasks” tab of the PCF Apps Manager UX, there’s a “jobs” section for scheduled tasks. Besides giving the job a name and a command (the same as the task command above), you enter a Cron expression for the schedule itself. The expression is in a MIN HOUR DAY-OF-MONTH MONTH DAY-OF-WEEK format. For example “15 * ? * * *” means you should run the job every 15 minutes, and “30 10 * * 5” means you should run the job at 10:30am every Friday. My job below is set to run every minute.

We’re all building lots of web apps nowadays, but you have lots of need for event-driven or scheduled background work. PCF may surprise you as an entirely suitable platform for those workloads.

Categories: .NET, Cloud, Cloud Foundry, Messaging, Pivotal

The post Wait, THAT runs on Pivotal Cloud Foundry? Part 3 – Background, batch, and scheduled jobs appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Streaming is all the rage! No, not binge-watching Arrested Development on Netflix. Rather, I mean data stream processing: ingesting and handling infinite datasets. Instead of chewing through a nightly or weekly batch of records, you’re doing near real-time processing. Done correctly, this helps you improve data quality and make faster decisions. But how do you arrange the sequence of steps to process that data? Data pipelines! In this post, I’ll show you that this is yet another unexpected workload that runs pretty darn well on Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF).

So far in this series, we’ve looked at other workloads ranging from Docker images to batch jobs.

Let’s build a pipeline that processes a stream of shipment data that flows out of a relational database, gets enriched with additional info, and finally gets written to a log.

Spinning up Spring Cloud Data Flow on PCF

You could do streaming a few ways in PCF. You could manually deploy a PCF-managed instance of RabbitMQ, Solace PubSub+, or Apache Kafka. Or connect to a cloud-based broker like Azure Service Bus or Google Pub/Sub through a Service Broker. Any of those options give you a messaging backbone, but a data pipeline often involves a sequence of orchestrated steps. One turnkey solution that combines lightweight messaging with smart orchestration is Spring Cloud Data Flow (SCDF).

While it’s not that challenging to install SCDF yourself, PCF bundles it all up into a single package. All it takes is deploying the “Data Flow Server” from the PCF marketplace.

After BOSH built and deployed the Spring Cloud Data Flow server and dependent services (database, Redis cache, RabbitMQ instance), I also provisioned an instance of PostgreSQL from Crunchy Data. This is the source to my data stream.

That was easy.  From this screen on PCF Apps Manager, I could click through and log into the SCDF dashboard. From here, I loaded all the Spring Cloud Stream App Starters. These are “just” Spring Boot apps, but we can use these to build data streams. We can build our own apps to, but it’s great to pre-load these starters. Note that everything I’m doing with this dashboard you can also do with a CLI.

With that, I had everything I needed to build out my data pipeline. 

Building and deploying a data pipeline

Before building my pipeline, I wanted to prep my PostgreSQL database. To do this, I built a simple ASP.NET Core app that created a data table and added records. I deployed this to PCF, bound it to the Crunchy Data instance, and now had a way to instantiate my relational database and add rows.

I wanted to enrich data as part of my data pipeline. When a “shipment” record comes out of PostgreSQL, it has an identifier for which warehouse it came from. I wanted to use that ID to look up the US state associated with the warehouse. I could try and use an out-of-the-box App Starter to do it, or just build my own. I chose the latter. What’s wicked is these are just Spring Cloud Stream apps. I created a new app from start.spring.io, created a POJO that represents a “warehouse shipment”, added an annotation and a method, and assembled the jar file. No other configurations needed! 

@EnableBinding(Processor.class)
@SpringBootApplication
public class DemoPipelineEnricherApplication {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
     SpringApplication.run(DemoPipelineEnricherApplication.class, 
  args);
  }

  @StreamListener(Processor.INPUT)
  @SendTo(Processor.OUTPUT)
  public shipment EnrichShipment(shipment s) {
    switch(s.warehouse_id) {
    case 400:
        s.warehouse_location="CA";
        break;
    case 401:
        s.warehouse_location="WA";
        break;
    case 402:
        s.warehouse_location="TX";
        break;
    case 403:
        s.warehouse_location="FL";
        break;
    }
    return s;
  }
}

To make this app available to my new data pipeline, I needed to register it with the SCDF server. That means the jar file needed to be visible to the server. I uploaded the jar file to GitHub (better choices include the Maven repo, or another legit artifact repository) and registered it:

It’s pipeline time! I designed a pipeline that started with a JDBC source, sent the individual rows to my “enricher” app, and then routed the results to the application log. For fun, I also tapped that result stream to count how many messages came in for each US state.

The pipeline definition is something you can add to source control and version like any other deployment artifact. My pipeline looks like:

warehouse-stream=jdbc
--spring.datasource.username='[username]'
--spring.datasource.url='jdbc:postgresql://[url]:5432/shipments'
--jdbc.max-rows-per-poll=5 --jdbc.query='SELECT * FROM WarehouseShipments WHERE
is_read=FALSE' --jdbc.update='UPDATE WarehouseShipments SET is_read=TRUE WHERE
is_read=FALSE;' --spring.datasource.password='[password]' |
demo-enricher | log 

What’s cool is that after creating the stream, I had all sorts of deployment options for each app in the pipeline. That means that each app could have its own instance count and resource allocation. Much better than coarsely scaling the whole pipeline when just one component needs to scale! 

After deploying the streams, I saw the underlying Spring Boot apps deployed to my PCF environment. SCDF is pretty sophisticated but still an easy-to-use platform!

I continually added records to my PostgreSQL database, and saw them immediately stream through SCDF on PCF. Each individual message got enriched with additional details before printing out to the log.

In this post, we saw that data pipelines have a natural home in PCF. Spring Cloud Data Flow is an ideal replacement for heavyweight ESB products in certain scenarios, and a replacement for ETL in others. Give it a try on PCF, Kubernetes, or other runtimes.

Categories: Cloud, Cloud Foundry, OSS, Pivotal, Spring

The post Wait, THAT runs on Pivotal Cloud Foundry? Part 4 – Data pipelines appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Introduction

SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol also known as Secure File Transfer Protocol) is a secure file transferring protocol between two remote systems, which runs over Secure Shell protocol (SSH). It provides strong authentication and secure encrypted data communication between two computers, which are connecting over an insecure network. It was designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a secure extension. SSH provides the secure file transfer capabilities.

In this article, we will explain how to configure SFTP, how to use it with BizTalk Server and how you can set up monitoring SFTP using BizTalk360.

Contents

• How to Configure SFTP
• Types of authentication available in SFTP
• Using SFTP in BizTalk Server
• Monitoring SFTP using BizTalk360 Application

How to Configure SFTP

SFTP has replaced legacy FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and FTP/S and it provides all the functionality offered by these protocols, but the protocol is more secure and reliable. Also, configuration is easier.

Following are the steps to configure SFTP:

• Download the OpenSSH for server using OpenSSH for Windows binaries (Packages OpenSSH-Win64.zip or OpenSSH-Win32.zip)

Link: https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/releases

• Extract the package in folder location ‘C:Program Files’ as an administrator and install the SSH and SSHD services using the following command:
  exe -Execution Policy Bypass -File install-sshd.psl
• Once you have run the above command, the SSH server and server agent will install the system and start the service in the services.msc

The SFTP port number for the SSH port is 22, basically just an SSH Server. Once the user has logged in to the server using SSH, the SFTP protocol can be initiated. There is no separate SFTP port exposed on the servers. There is also no need to configure another rule into the firewalls.

Once the command is executed in PowerShell, the rule is created in the firewall section.

Using Public Keys for SSH Authentication

One effective way of securing SSH access to the server, is to use a Public/Private Key pair. This means that the generated key pair, consists of a public key (allowed to know) and a private key (keep secret and don’t give to anybody). The private key can generate a Signature and cannot be forged for anybody who doesn’t have that key. But using the public key, anybody can verify that a signature is genuine. The public key is placed on the server and a private key is placed on local workstation. Using a key pair, it becomes impossible for someone to log in by using just a password, in case you have set up SSH to deny password-based authentication.

Create the .ssh directory in a local folder and create a file named as “authorized_keys”, where we store the public key for authentication.

Generating Keys

PuTTYgen is a key generator. It generates pairs of public and private keys. When you run the PuTTYgen, you will see a window where you have two choices:

• Generate – to generate a new Public/Private key pair
• Load – to load an existing private key

Before generating a key pair, using PuTTYgen, you need to select which type of key you need.

PuTTYgen currently supports the following type of keys:

• An RSA key for use with the SSH-1 protocol
• An RSA key for use with the SSH-2 protocol
• A DSA key for use with the SSH-2 protocol
• An ECDSA (Elliptic Curve DSA) key for use with the SSH-2 protocol
• An Ed25519 key (another elliptic curve algorithm) for use with the SSH-2 protocol

Here, we will generate a RSA key, for use with the SSH-1 Protocol.

• Download the PuTTYgen from the web site
• Launch the program and click “Generate” button. The program generates the keys for you
  
  

• Once you click the Generate button, you must generate some randomness, by moving the mouse over the blank area

• Enter the unique Key passphrase and Confirm passphrase fields

• Save the public and private keys, by clicking Save Public Key and Save Private Key buttons

• From the Public Key, for pasting it into the OpenSSH authorized_keys file field at the top of the window, copy all the text (starting with ssh-rsa). The copied key must be pasted either into the public key tool, in the Control Panel, or directly into the authorized keys file on your server.

Using SFTP Adapter in BizTalk Server

BizTalk Server provides the SFTP adapter to send and receive a file from a secure FTP server using the SSH file transfer protocol. Let’s see how can configure the SFTP adapter for receiving and sending a file from the secure server.

• In the BizTalk Admin Console, create a SFTP Receive Port in the BizTalk application where you want to have it
• Create a Receive Location within that Receive Port
• Select the Transport Type as SFTP from the drop-down list

In the Properties section, configure the following steps:

Others

• Connection Limit – Specify the maximum number of concurrent connections that can be opened to the server

Polling

•  Polling Interval – Specify the interval at which the adapter polls the server. To poll continuously, set this value to zero

Default Value: 5

• Unit – Specifies the unit in which the polling interval is specified. For example: Seconds, Minutes, Hours or Days

Security

• Accept Any SSH  Server Host key – When the option is set as True, SSH will accept the connection from the host server; when it is set as False, the Receive Location uses the fingerprint of the server for authentication. For the authentication, you need to provide the finger print in the SSHServerHostKeyFingerPrint field.

• Client Authentication

There are three client authentication methods:

• Password
• PublicKeyAuthentication
• MultiFactorAuthentication

Password authentication mode is simply providing the password in the console for authenticating the client. For the PublicKeyAuthentication, you must provide the private key file in the PrivateKey field and provide the passphrase in the PrivateKeyPassword for authenticating.

For MultiFactorAuthentication, the user must provide the user name, password and Privatekey. If the private key is protected by a passphrase, you also need to provide that in the privatekeyPassword field.

• Password –  Specify the password, if you have set the ClientAuthentication mode to password
• Private Key – Specify the private key for the SFTP user, if you have set the ClientAuthenticationMode to Publickeyauthentication
• Private Key Password – Specify the passphrase key to validate the private key
• SSH Server Host Key Fingerprint – It specifies the fingerprint of the public host key for the SSH server
• Username – Specifies a username to log on to the SFTP server

SSH Server

• File Mask – Specifies the file mask to use when retrieving files from a secure SFTP server
• Folder path – Specifies the folder path on the secure SFTP server from where the Receive Location can retrieve files
• Port – Specifies the port address for the secure SFTP server on which the file transfer takes place
• Server Address – Specifies the server name or IP address of the secure SFTP server

Configuring the Send Port

For Configuring the Send Port, create a Send Port or double click an existing send port to modify it in an application in the BizTalk Administration Console.

• On the General Tab, Choose the type of SFTP artifact in the transport section and click the configuration button.
• In the SFTP Transport Properties window configure the following options based on requirement

Others

• Connection Limit – Maximum number of concurrent connections that can be opened to the server
• Log – Creating client-side log file to trouble shoot any errors. Enter the full path for creating the log file and its available from BizTalk Server 2016
• Temporary Folder – A temporary folder on the SFTP server to upload large files before automatically moved to the required location on the same server and its available from BizTalk server 2013 R2

Proxy

• Address –Specifies either DNS or IP Address of the Proxy server
• Password –Specifies the Password of the proxy server
• Port – Specifies the port of the Proxy Server
• Type – Specifies the protocol used by the proxy server
• User Name – Specifies the User Name of the Proxy server

Security

• Access Any SSH Server Host Key – When True, the send port accept any SSH Public host key from the server and if set as false, the port matches the host key with the key specified in the SSHServerHostKey
• Client Authentication Mode – Specifies the authentication method that the send port uses for authenticating the client to the SSH Server.

Three modes of authentication

• Password – If set as Password , you must provide the password in the Password Property
• PublicKeyAuthentication – if set as PublicKeyAuthentication, you must provide the private key of the user in the PrivateKey
• MultiFactorAuthentication – if set as MultiFactorAuthentication, you must provide UserName with its Password. If the private key is protected by a password, provide the password in the PrivateKeyPassword as well

• EncryptionCipher – Provide the kind of encryption cipher and available from BizTalk Server 2013 R2. Options are Auto, AES and TripleDES in the BizTalk Server 2013 R2 and for the BizTalk Server 2016 Auto, AES, Arcfour, Blowfish, TripleDES, and
• Password – Specify the SFTP user password if you set the ClientAuthenticationMode to Password
• Private Key – Specify the private key for the SFTP user if you set the ClientAuthenticationMode to PublicKeyAuthentication
• Private Key Password – Specify a private key password, if required for the key specified in the PrivateKey
• SSH Server Host Key Finger Print – Specifies the fingerprint of the server used by the adapter to authenticate the server if the AccessAnySSHServerHostKey property is set to False. If the fingerprints do not match, the connection fails.
• User Name – Specifies the username for the secure FTP Server

SSH Server

• Append If Exist – if the file being transferred to the secure FTP server already exists at the destination, this property specifies whether the data from the file being transferred should be appended to the existing file. If set to True, the data is appended. If set to False, the file at the destination server is overwritten
• Folder Path – Specifies the folder path on the secure FTP server where the file is copied
• Port – Specifies the port address for the secure FTP server on which the file transfer takes place
• Server Address – Specifies the server name or IP address of the secure FTP server
• Target File Name – Specifies the name with which the file is transferred to the secure FTP server. You can also use macros for the target file name

• Click Apply and OK again to save settings

Monitor the SFTP Location using BizTalk360

From the v8.4, under File Location in the Monitoring section, BizTalk360 has the capability to monitor SFTP servers. File Location Monitoring will list all the locations configured in the BizTalk artifacts (Send Ports and Receive Locations) for the SFTP Transport type. This helps users to easily monitor all the SFTP locations mapped within the Receive Locations/Send Ports.

It contains four sections:

• SSH Server Section has the details about the SFTP Location
• The Proxy Details Section is optional to connect to a SFTP Server behind a firewall

Note: In BizTalk, Proxy details are available from BizTalk 2013 R2

• Security Details Section has the authentication details
• In the SFTP Monitoring Config Section, you can configure the monitor with threshold conditions for the metric File Count

Based on the  need, you can monitor the location with threshold conditions. If the specific condition is met, the user gets notified through an email, a SMS or another communication channel.

For monitoring the SFTP server, BizTalk360 uses the third-party tool nSoftware. Using the nSoftware IPWorks SSH product, BizTalk360 connects to the secure server with Private Keys and password for monitoring the location.

For monitoring the SFTP in BizTalk360 you can refer the knowledge base in this link.

See below, some code snippets for connecting to the secure server using nSoftware.

Password Authentication

sftp.SSHUser = “test”;
sftp.SSHPassword = “password”;
sftp.SSHPort = 22;
sftp.SSHHost = “SSHHost”;
sftp.Config(“SSHAcceptServerHostKeyFingerPrint=6a:d3:65:96:d1:9f:9d:f9:57:4e:6b:3b:11:57:5a:15”);
sftp.SSHLogon(sftp.SSHHost, sftp.SSHPort);
Console.WriteLine(“Authenticated”);
sftp.SSHLogoff();

Public key Authentication

 
sftp.SSHUser = "test";
sftp.SSHCert = new Certificate(CertStoreTypes.cstPPKKeyFile, "....filesserver_cert.pem", "test", "*");
sftp.SSHAuthMode = SftpSSHAuthModes.amPublicKey;
sftp.SSHPort = 22;
sftp.SSHHost = "SSHHost";
sftp.Config("SSHAcceptServerHostKeyFingerPrint=6a:d3:65:96:d1:9f:9d:f9:57:4e:6b:3b:11:57:5a:15");
sftp.SSHLogon(sftp.SSHHost, sftp.SSHPort);
Console.WriteLine("Authenticated");
sftp.SSHLogoff()

Conclusion

This article demonstrates the creation of a SFTP Server. Using the SFTP server in BizTalk Receive Locations and Send Ports, you can send files securely  and monitor the SFTP server using BizTalk360.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please write to us at support@biztalk360.com.
        

The post SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol/Secure File Transfer Protocol) appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Looking for a host suitable for .NET Framework apps? Windows Server virtual machines are almost your only option. The only public cloud PaaS product that offers a higher abstraction than virtual machines is Azure’s App Service. And that’s not really meant to run an entire enterprise portfolio. So … what to do? Don’t say “switch to .NET Core and run on all the Linux-based platforms” because that’s cheating. What can you do today? The best option you don’t know about is Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF). In this post, I’ll show you how to easily deploy and operate .NET apps in PCF on any infrastructure.

This is part five of a five part series. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed my exploration of workloads you might not expect to see on a cloud-native platform like PCF.

About PAS for Windows

Quickly, I want to tell you about Pivotal Application Service (PAS) for Windows. Recall that PCF is really made up of two software abstractions atop a sophisticated infrastructure management platform (BOSH): Pivotal Application Service (for apps) and Pivotal Container Service (for raw containers). PAS for Windows extends PAS with managed Windows Server instances. As an operator, you can deploy, patch, upgrade, and operate Windows Server instances entirely through automation. For developers, you get a on-demand, scalable host that supports remote debugging and much more. I feel pretty safe saying that this is better than whatever you’re doing today for Windows workloads!

Deploying a WCF application to PCF

Let’s do this. First, I confirmed that I had a Windows “stack” available to me. In my PCF environment, I ran a cf stacks command.

Yup, all good. I created a new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) application targeting .NET Framework 4.0. All of your apps aren’t using the latest framework, so why should my sample? Note that you can run all types of classic .NET projects in PCF: ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, Web API, WCF, console, and more.

My WCF service doesn’t need to change at all to run in PCF. To publish to PCF, I just need to provide a set of command line parameters, or, write a manifest with those parameters. My manifest looked like this:

---
applications: 
- name: blog-demo-wcf  
memory: 256M  
instances: 1  
buildpack: hwc_buildpack  
stack: windows2016  
env:    
betaflag: on

There’s a buildpack just for .NET apps on Windows and all I have to do is push the code itself. About fifteen seconds after typing cf push, my WCF service was packaged up and loaded into a Windows Server container.

Browsing the endpoint returned that familiar page of WCF service metadata. 

Operating your .NET app on PCF

It’s one thing to deploy an app, it’s another thing to manage it. PCF makes that pretty easy. After deploying a .NET app, I see some helpful metadata. It shows me the stack, buildpack, and any environment variables visible to the app.

How long does it take you to get a new instance of your .NET app into production today? Weeks? Months? I just scaled up from one to three Windows container instances in less than ten seconds. I just love that.

Any app written in any language gets access to the same set of PCF functionality. Your .NET Framework apps get built-in log aggregation, metrics and monitoring, autoscaling, and more. All in a multi-tenant environment. And with straightforward access to anything in the marketplace through the Service Broker interface. Want your .NET Framework app to talk to Azure’s Cosmos DB or Google Cloud Spanner? Just use the broker.

Oh, and don’t forget that because PAS for Windows uses legit Windows Server containers, each app instance gets its own copy of the file system, registry, and GAC. You can see this by SSH-ing into the container. Yes, I said you could SSH in. It’s just a cf ssh command.

That’s a full Windows file system, and I can even spin up Powershell in there. Crazy times.

Categories: .NET, Cloud, Cloud Foundry, DevOps, Pivotal, WCF/WF

The post Wait, THAT runs on Pivotal Cloud Foundry? Part 5 – .NET Framework apps appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform?

Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.

If you want to receive these updates weekly, then don’t forget to Subscribe!

Feedback

Hope this would be helpful. Please feel free to reach out to me with your feedback and questions.

The post Microsoft Integration Weekly Update: October 15, 2018 appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Notifications are an established concept for alerting users. By default, a number of external notification channels are inbuilt into BizTalk360. The only step you need to do, is to configure these notification channels with the appropriate URL, Access Token value (for Slack) and Authentication settings (for ServiceNow and WebHook), and Teams WebHook Connector (for Microsoft Teams). What this means for you, is that if you are already using either of these channels in your organization, it becomes easier to receive alerts from BizTalk360 right into these channels.

Since previous versions of BizTalk360, the notifications from BizTalk360 can be sent through various channels like:

Besides the above mentioned channels, BizTalk360 also provides an easy to use API, to enable you to create notification channels for connecting to your own systems. Read more about creating your own custom notification channels in our Documentation portal.

Now, integration with PowerShell allows you to execute a PowerShell script, each time an alarm is triggered when the threshold is crossed.

This was one of the features most requested by customers, as a nice to have requirement, as it would enable them to perform some tasks via a PowerShell script, each time the alarm was triggered.

Steps to implement the PowerShell Notification Channel

It only takes a few steps to use the PowerShell Notification Channel:

• Create the PowerShell script
• Configuring the PowerShell Notification Channel in BizTalk360

Both steps are explained below.

Create the PowerShell script

1. Create the script in the PowerShell ISE or a plain text editor such as Notepad and save it with a .PS1 file extension (for example, myscript.ps1)
2. Run the script by entering the full path to the script (c:/scripts/myscript.ps1), or if it’s in the current directory, prefix it with a period followed by a slash ( ./myscript.ps1 )

Configuring the PowerShell Notification Channel in BizTalk360

• You can find the Powershell Notification Channel under Settings > Monitoring and Notification > Manage Notification Channels. Select Notifier.PowerShellNotification
• Click “Configure” to open the configuration panel

During the configuration, provide the path along with the file name where the PowerShell script is present.

• In the Alarm section (Monitoring -> Manage Alarms), when you edit the alarm, enable the PowerShell notifications channel using the slider.

Note: Unless you wish to override the script provided in the settings page, there is no need to provide the path once again

Whenever a violation appears for the given alarm, this will trigger the notification channel and it will hit the PowerShell script. 

Here, in the sample PowerShell script(Restart.ps1), we have included some basic code to restart the BizTalk360 Analytics service, but you can include more complex code to perform any actions via a Powershell script.

Customer Scenarios

• Use case 1: Automatically disable a receive location, such as when suspended instances hit a certain threshold

Consider the following setup – Microsoft CRM plugins, connected to a Receive Location are failing periodically. When they are down, the customer gets flooded with suspended instances. To prevent this from happening, the user wants to Disable the Receive Location.

This is how we can implement this using BizTalk360.

1. Configure the PowerShell notification Channel
2. First, create a Threshold alarm and setup the notification channel to be PowerShell, providing the script name if you wish to override the default Powershell script provided
3. Then, in Manage Mapping, select the alarm and the artifact – Suspended Instances and put our threshold which causes the alarm to trigger

Now when the alarm triggers, along with the default email notification, the PowerShell script which disables the receive location mentioned in the script, will be run. Any errors will be logged in the PowerShell notification channel log (External.log).

• Use case 2: Stopping Host Instances, in case of too many running instances

A customer uses Data Monitoring for monitoring running instances of a particular orchestration in BizTalk. Sometimes it occurs that the application generates more messages than the downstream system can handle. To prevent damage, the Host Instances which serve the BizTalk application, need to be stopped to be able to identify the root cause.

The PowerShell notification channel not just works with Threshold alarms, but also based on Data Monitors. In above scenario, a Message Box Data Monitor has been setup, but you could also trigger PowerShell scripts based on the other categories of Data Monitoring. This could make the PowerShell notification channel to a strong extension of your tool set.

• Use case 3: We could fire a PowerShell script to restart IIS

We can implement these scenarios using BizTalk360 using similar steps as scenario1 but now the Alarm will be a Threshold alarm, not on Application artifacts but in BizTalk Environment -> Web Endpoint Monitoring.

Like scenario1 the alarm will have PowerShell notification enabled and when the Web end-point is triggered when the response is not fast enough, the Powershell script will run and restart the windows service (This should be programmed in the .ps1 file)

So, I hope these scenarios gave you a good idea of how the PowerShell notification channel can help you. This can also be considered as an action to be carried out if the alarms are triggered.

Author: Rochelle Saldanha

Rochelle Saldanha is currently working in the Customer Support & Client Relationship Teams at BizTalk360. She loves travelling and watching movies. View all posts by Rochelle Saldanha

The post Introducing the PowerShell Notification Channel in BizTalk360 appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Happy to announce that today I decided to publish another release on my Mapper Extensions UtilityPack project. This time I decided to release 2 new BizTalk Database Functoids:

• Adv Database Lookup Functoid: Use the Adv Database Lookup functoid to extract information from a database and store it as a Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) recordset. This functoid requires the following 3 inputs: a database connection string, table name and a WHERE clause.
• Adv Value Extractor: Use the Adv Value Extrator functoid to extract the appropriate column value from a recordset returned by the Adv Database Lookup functoid. This functoid requires two inputs parameters: a link to the Database Lookup functoid and a column name.

Basically, they have the same functionality as the default Database Lookup Functoid and Value Extractor Functoid but they have a slightly different implementation.

Unlike the default Database Lookup Functoid that have 4 input parameters

• A lookup value
• A database connection string
• A table name
• A column name for the lookup value.

The limitation of this Functoid is that you cannot have multiple conditions, like WHERE SalesPersonID = “A” and System = “B” because of the nature of how this functoid was created

The Adv Database Lookup Functoid have the goal to suppress this limitation, it will allow 3 inputs:

• A database connection string
• A table name
• A WHERE clause.

In the where condition you will be able to set all the conditions you want, including a combination of AND’s and OR’s.

The Adv Value Extractor Functoid has the exact same functionality that the default Value Extractor Functoid but prepared and optimized to work with the Adv Database Lookup Functoid.

Adv Database Lookup Functoid

Use the Adv Database Lookup functoid to extract information from a database and store it as a Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) recordset.

Parameters

The functoid takes three mandatory input parameters:

• Parameter 1: An ActiveX Data Objects .NET (ADO.NET) connection string for a compliant data source in which to search. ODBC data sources (including DSN sources) are not supported.
  • Provider=SQLOLEDB.1;Integrated Security=SSPI;Persist Security Info=False;Initial Catalog=DatabaseName;Data Source=SQLServerName
• Parameter 2: The name of the table in the database in which to search;
  • tblSalesPersons
• Parameter 3: WHERE clause (without the WHERE)
  • SourceSystemID like ‘A’ AND SSSalesPersonID = 1

The output of the functoid will be an ADO recordset.

Adv Value Extractor Functoid

Use the Adv Value Extrator functoid to extract the appropriate column value from a recordset returned by the Adv Database Lookup functoid. This functoid requires two inputs parameters: a link to the Database Lookup functoid and a column name.

Parameters

The functoid takes two mandatory input parameters:

• Parameter 1: An ADO recordset, which is the output of the Database Lookup functoid. This recordset never contains more than one database row.
• Parameter 2: The name of a column from which to extract a value for output.
  • TargetSalesPersonID

The output of the functoid will be the value of that column on the database table.

BizTalk Mapper Extensions UtilityPack: Project Description

BizTalk Mapper Extensions UtilityPack is a set of libraries with several useful functoids to include and use it in a map, which will provide an extension of BizTalk Mapper capabilities.

Where to download?

You can download this functoid along with all the existing one on the BizTalk Mapper Extensions UtilityPack  here:
BizTalk Mapper Extensions UtilityPack
GitHub

Author: Sandro Pereira

Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community. View all posts by Sandro Pereira

The post BizTalk Mapper Extensions UtilityPack: New Database Functoids appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

In our series of Guest Bloggers, we are pleased to announce Ahmed Taha, from LinkDev, Egypt! Ahmed is not new to the community as he has already hosted some Integration Monday sessions and loves to visit real-world events as well. We thought that his last Integration Monday session would make a good read, so he converted that session to this blog post. You can view this Integration Monday session from the Integration user Group web site. A warm welcome to Ahmed!

Introduction

A few years ago, I had an extremely challenging requirement in a BizTalk project that was integrating the customer’s system with several web services from disparate external backend systems. These systems had different communication protocols, message formats, and throughput limits.
The latter requirement was extremely challenging to implement, and it is actually not a very common one. However, it is worth noting that lately, I have been seeing this requirement, stated more often in new customers’ request for proposal (RFP) documents.

Landscape

First, let me paint a complete picture for you, with the overall landscape.

As a first stage, the flow starts with an upstream system that has multiple input channels for entering and storing user entities into a staging data store.

In the second stage, the integration scope starts by polling user entity batches from the staging data store. Next, a fan-out approach is conducted, to scatter each single user entity into multiple requests, one for each web service, from a wide range of external web services.

Afterwards, the response data from each web service is stored separately in a dedicated table entity inside the same database, in a fragmented manner.

At the third and final stage, a mission-critical downstream system is continuously analysing these fragmented data for all the users, to perform critical data processing needed for decision making, as well as provide near real-time reporting from the aggregation of the response data.

Customer Requirements

The following are some of the key generic requirements:

• The entire process will be performed continuously, governed by a set of pre-defined business rules that determines if already fetched data fragment is stale, and needs to be refreshed
• The upstream staging data store will usually contain a large volume of user entities, and the upstream system input is expected to be of high throughput
• There are also some business rules that govern the routing logic, to decide which external systems need to be invoked, based on selected user criteria

So far, these above-mentioned requirements could easily be implemented as a BizTalk messaging solution, along with Business Rules Engine (BRE) policies to apply the governing business rules. For a robust messaging solution, I would highly recommend that you leverage the powerful BRE pipeline framework. Check my article on BRE pipeline framework.

Now, here comes the more challenging set of requirements, and if you are like me, you would be excited for having a good challenge, every now and then:

• Each of these back-end web services allowed for a maximum throughput (i.e. transactions per minute) which must not be exceeded, subsequent requests beyond that limit will fail
• At the same time, the integration solution must not invoke the services at rates that are way below the defined throughput limit, to maintain the overall efficiency of the solution
  
• These throughput limits should be configurable and could be variable based on specified time ranges, days of the week, date ranges, or a combination from all these options. BRE DB-facts were used for this requirement, coupled with a web-based control panel for the configurable DB values. The DB prefixes shown below denotes the BRE DB-facts.

To come up with the right solution, some research was necessary. During that research, few different approaches were tried:

• Throttling Aggregator Orchestration
• Throttling Pipeline Component

Both approaches are described below.

First Approach – Throttling Aggregator Orchestration

Using an orchestration might be the first thing to come to your mind, in order to control and throttle the incoming messages in a stateful manner using the orchestration canvas.

This is a straight-forward implementation of an aggregator orchestration, which will run as a singleton orchestration instance for each defined back-end system.

To implement the actual throttling effect, the orchestration will simply include a delay shape that introduces the required latency in-between the incoming requests, in order to achieve the required throughput for a given back-end system.

For instance, a back-end system with a throughput limit of (6) requests per minute, will require the delay shape to induce a (10) second delay before every request in its corresponding orchestration instance.

Let’s have a look at the overall message flow. It starts with a polling receive location, where a pipeline component applies the required business rules and enriches the message context with throttling-related & routing-related information, before scattering the polled request into multiple requests, one for each designated back-end service.

A singleton orchestration for each system will apply the required throttling. You will notice that the orchestration is leveraging BRE & DB-facts to get the DB configured throttling information for the given back-end system. Memory cache is used to enhance the performance by minimizing the overhead impact of the BRE DB-facts during the BRE policy call.

While the orchestration approach works well, there are some caveats you should be aware of:

• Orchestration Delay shape is not very accurate when it comes to high precision, small delay values
• Orchestration persistence points will add extra latency which, in turn, lower the overall throughput outcome even further than intended
• Zombie messages are an inevitable byproduct of aggregator orchestrations, this will happen if the orchestration is designed to terminate after an idle time, or gracefully terminates after encountering errors
• Generally, production-grade orchestrations tend to be very complex and large in size, which will consequently affect its readability and maintainability

Second Approach – Throttling Pipeline Component

In order to avoid the above-mentioned caveats of using an aggregator orchestration, instead, you can leverage a pipeline component at the back-end system’s send port that will introduce the necessary latency, right before sending away the message to the designated service. This way you can achieve the required throughput outcome for a given back-end system.

The induced latency could be implemented using the Thread.Sleep() method, or as an infinite While loop that breaks after the required delay period has elapsed. I tried them both, with similar results, although I would personally be very much hesitant to use a while(true) loop in production.

The pipeline component approach is what I actually used for my final solution, as it has the flexibility and control I needed, without any additional latency, affecting the throughput outcome, coming from platform overheads that is beyond my control. After all, it’s my code and it can be optimized as much as possible.

Throttling Pipeline Component Send Port Settings

Another important part of this approach is to apply the following configurations that will disable concurrent processing of messages for the throttled send ports. This way, messages are processed sequentially, one message at a time, under the full control of your throttling pipeline component. This requirement could be achieved by configuring the throttled send ports.

• Retry must be disabled on the throttled send ports
• Ordered Delivery must be enabled on the throttled send ports
• Cluster Hosts for the throttled send ports in a highly available BizTalk solution

BizTalk Throttling General Tips

1. Efficient Throttling solutions should minimize or completely avoid message box hops. It should be applied at the edges of the solution. This is because message box hops itself will cause additional latency, which will impact the reached throughput outcome. In fact, the optimum position for the throttling component is at send port edge, right before sending the message to the back-end system. It could also be applied in receive end, but again, you will be at the mercy of the message box hops latency and performance.

2. Applying the throttling component directly on a back-end system (2-way) send port will include the service response time as an additional overhead in-between the throttled requests. This will slow down the message frequency and impact the reached throughput outcome. Check the below diagram, where a back-end system takes (10) seconds to process a single request, because of the enforced ordered delivery of messages. Message (2) request will not be processed by the send port until Message (1) response is returned back by the system.

3. As mentioned earlier in the requirements section, the solution had to be efficient, that is, it needed to leverage the maximum allowed throughput limits by the back-end systems, without any additional latency. Therefore, I had to go against my first tip for avoiding message box hops, as I had to apply the throttling component and port settings on another send port with a loop-back adapter, right before eventually routing the message to the actual back-end service send port.

4. It is very important that you make sure that the BizTalk built-in throttling does not kick-in and impact the overall solution throughout. Interestingly, this will initially slow down your system, and after the root cause has been alleviated and the built-in throttling subsides, some of the remaining messages could bombard the back-end systems at higher rates. The root cause for BizTalk throttling will be different for each solution, so you will need to conduct a comprehensive end-to-end load testing under realistic loads to identify and fine-tune BizTalk throttling thresholds in the BizTalk Host settings.

5. Following the previous tip, load testing will also allow you to find & fix the weak points in your BizTalk artifacts, for instance, it could be an unoptimized code snippet in a pipeline component, or in a map. In my case it was the performance of the loop back adapter I used, which I had to replace.

6. HTTP performance optimization in BizTalk Host configuration settings (BTSNTSvc.exe.config), will only control the maximum concurrent connections for HTTP-based adapters. However, it will not work for achieving specific throughput. That is, the number of requests allowed per time unit. Don’t forget the “per time unit” part. In other words, (5) requests per (1) minute, is not the same as, (5) requests per (1) second, is not the same as, (5) concurrent requests, within any given time window.

Lessons Learned

• BizTalk built-in throttling is a cleverly designed feature that is used to protect the platform from being overwhelmed under large loads. However, it is not designed to achieve exact throughput values
• Achieving controlled, accurate throttling is extremely challenging, especially when the latency is required to be at a minimum, it will also require intensive testing and fine tuning that might vary for each solution
• The throttling solution will introduce an inevitable latency to the solution, which could be minimized to negligible values. If you leverage the pipeline component approach with an optimized code, and conducted the necessary fine-tuning for BizTalk Server, the overhead for each request can be as low as 5 -10 milliseconds
• For guaranteed upper limit throughput only, you could apply the throttling component directly on the back-end system’s send port. This will completely avoid the extra message box hop, and you will not need the loop-back send port to apply the throttling, like I did.

Final Thoughts

The proliferation of API management

Nowadays, there is an awareness of API management tools. More and more organizations are leveraging API management to shield their back-end systems from huge loads, to apply the organization’s internal policies or to gain financial value from their data assets – API economy.

If the BizTalk published services and its underlying operations are as granular as the back-end ones, you could alternatively use an API management platform, in front of BizTalk, to apply the required throttling.

Are we bending the platform?

Is this controlled throttling implementation bending the platform into doing something that it is not supposed to be doing? – To answer this question, we need to have a closer look into the BizTalk platform design.
On the one hand, precise throttling is simply not baked into the platform, this is what most BizTalk experts and the Microsoft Product Group will acknowledge, which is true!
On the other hand, it is important not to forget that the BizTalk message box is an implementation of a Message Queue, supporting the store and forward messaging pattern.

Moreover, the send port service window feature incarnates message delayed delivery capability, by keeping the messages queued in the message box until the predefined time window is reached, before delivering the message.

If you have an even closer look into the message box database, specifically into the BizTalk host queue table, you will see that our Throttled Send Ports are simply work-in-progress messages and they are treated the same way as the scheduled messages using the built-in service window feature, albeit the start Window time is set the past; so far so good!

Moreover, the difference between the service window scheduling in the receive location and the send port shows another important hint. As seen below, unlike the receive location with its advanced scheduling options, the scheduling option for the send port only supports a time window range within a single day.

This intended limitation in the user interface hints that scheduled messages are not designed to stay in BizTalk message box for longer periods of time, in order not to overwhelm the message box.

This perfectly resonates with how Dan Rosanova eloquently described Message box work-in-progress items: “This aspect of BizTalk is critical, as it is not designed to hold too much information for too long, but to pass the information on and move it out of the message box.” – Dan Rosanova – Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns, Packt Publishing (October 28, 2011).

Consequently, if the back-end systems throughput limits will be high enough, to the point where it won’t let work-in-progress messages stay put in the message box for longer periods of time, then you will be achieving controlled throttling within the platform design boundaries.

Finally, controlled throttling in BizTalk Server should not be taken lightly., If you take into consideration all the previous guidelines, caveats, and conduct proper testing, you can achieve controlled throttling in BizTalk Server with confidence, and most importantly, without bending the platform.

Author: Ahmed Taha

Technical Architect with 10 years of hands-on experience in Microsoft Stack; .Net windows applications, web applications, BizTalk Server, SharePoint, SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS, and Integration with Azure Service Bus, and Logic Apps. BizTalk Server SME, conducting Integration POCs and demos for customers, provide consultancy and support for existing Integration projects in the Gulf, and Africa regions. View all posts by Ahmed Taha

The post BizTalk Server Controlled Throttling appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform?

Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.

If you want to receive these updates weekly, then don’t forget to Subscribe!

Feedback

Hope this would be helpful. Please feel free to reach out to me with your feedback and questions.

The post Microsoft Integration Weekly Update: October 22, 2018 appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Welcome back to my blog post series “BizTalk Server Tips and Tricks” for developers, administrators or business users.

There are several ways we can create an XML Schema in BizTalk Server:

• Manually from scratch
• From XDR Schema instance
• From a DTD instance
• From a well-formed XML instance
• Import them from a WCF Service or Web Service
• Automatically generated them from LOB systems (from the adapters)

Today, we will be talking about automatically generating XML Schemas from a well-formed XML instance. To accomplish this we need to perform the following steps:

• In Solution Explorer, right-click a BizTalk project, point to Add, and then click Add Generated Items…

• In the Add Generated Items – <BizTalk ProjectName> dialog box, in the Templates section, click Generate Schemas, and then click Add

• In the Generate Schemas dialog box, in the Document type drop-down list, select Well-Formed XML

• One of the problems, especially in brand new installations, is that sometimes this feature was not installed, and you will see Well-Formed XML (Not Loaded) in the drop-down list. To install and use this feature you need to:
  • Start a Windows Explorer and navigate to the “SDKUtilitiesSchema Generator” folder present in the BizTalk Server installation folder;
    • Normally it will be “C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft BizTalk Server <version>SDKUtilitiesSchema Generator”
  • Execute the InstallWFX.vbs script by double-clicking. This will install the “Microsoft.BizTalk.WFXToXSDGenerator.dll” DLL on the correct place
    • That basically means, it will copy this DLL to the “Developer ToolsSchema Editor Extensions” folder present in the BizTalk Server installation folder
  • Or manually copy “Microsoft.BizTalk.WFXToXSDGenerator.dll” DLL to the “Developer ToolsSchema Editor Extensions” folder, present in the BizTalk Server installation folder
    • Normally, it will be “C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft BizTalk Server <version>Developer ToolsSchema Editor Extensions
• Close the Generate Schemas dialog box and do the previous steps again, and now you will be able to see that you already can use the option Well-Formed XML in the drop-down list.

• In the Generate Schemas dialog box, click Browse, locate the file you want to import, click Open and then click OK

• A new schema, or sometimes at least two schemas are generated from the specified file, using the same name as that file with the .xsd extension, and opened in BizTalk Editor

TIP: Before you generate the schemas, rename the XML instance file that you will be using to the proper name you want to give to the Schemas, this will save you time because the Generator Wizard will:

• Give the same name of the specified file with the .xsd extension
• Or will add a sequence to the same name of the specified file with the .xsd extension

In the end, as a best practice, you should rectify or rename the schemas generated to something with context and that will be easy to identify:

If you want it to be perfect, then for each schema, you should change not only the name of the file, but also the Type Name property of each schema.

Initially, this value was set as “myfilename_0”.

The problem of renaming the filename and/or the Type Name property is that once you try to compile it will give you errors because some schemas will be referring files that no longer exist (were renamed):

To solve this, we need to:

• Open the Schema and select the Schema node at the top of the schema tree view
• In the Properties window, in the Advanced category, in the value portion of the Imports property, click the ellipsis (…) button
• In the Imports dialog box, in the Import Schema list, delete the XSD Import line, import the correct one and then click OK

• Alternatively, open the schema file in Notepad (Notepad ++ or other text editors) and rectify the path and filename

Quick, simple and practical!

Stay tuned for new tips and tricks!

Author: Sandro Pereira

Sandro Pereira is an Azure MVP and works as an Integration consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. View all posts by Sandro Pereira

The post BizTalk Server Tips and Tricks: Automatically Generate Schemas from a Well-Formed XML instance appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack community project for BizTalk Server 2016, once again, got a new update and it now has a new component that you can use in your custom BizTalk Server pipelines: Unzip File Pipeline Component.

Unzip File Pipeline Component

The Unzip File Pipeline Component for BizTalk Server can be used in a Received pipeline (Disassemble stage), and it allows you to receive a compress (zip/gzip) file and extract its contents into different XML messages.

• The capabilities are like those available in any compression software such as WinZip or 7-zip:
• This component doesn’t require any configurations.

This was an old component that I had that I now updated and improved to BizTalk Server 2016 with the help with my internal team at DevScope, in particular, Pedro Almeida.

You do not need to add a custom pipeline component to be used by the BizTalk Runtime to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC).

What is BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack?

BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack is a set of custom pipeline components (libraries) with several custom pipeline components that can be used in received and sent pipelines, which will provide an extension of BizTalk out-of-the-box pipeline capabilities.

The project is available on BizTalk Server Open Source Community repository on GitHub (https://github.com/BizTalkCommunity), and everyone can contribute with new pipeline components that can be extended or improve the existing BizTalk Server capabilities.

At the moment it is only available for BizTalk Server 2016, but it will soon be compiled and available for previous versions of the product.

Where to download it?

You can download BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack from GitHub here:
BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack
GitHub

Author: Sandro Pereira

Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community. View all posts by Sandro Pereira

The post BizTalk Pipeline Components Extensions Utility Pack: Unzip File Pipeline Component appeared first on BizTalkGurus.

Introduction

Custom widgets are powerful feature in BizTalk360, that allow the users to bring third-party integrations into BizTalk360.  It will be useful to bring the custom solutions into the BizTalk environment as it allows to view integrated solutions in one single tool.

Custom widgets can be used for various purposes, below list constitute few important scenarios;

• Embed third-party portals like Power BI or internal portals
• Monitor BizTalk Artifact Statuses
• Display query results using Secure SQL Queries

In this article, we can see important best practices while creating Custom widgets.

Best Practices 

1. Hiding confidential information in Custom Widgets with Placeholders

Custom Widgets are created using API’s (e.g.: BizTalk360 or BizTalk Integration API), which might contain confidential information like the credentials of your BizTalk360 Service Account or API Authenticated credentials. Of course, you don’t want this information to be revealed in plain text in your widgets. To hide such confidential information, you can use Placeholders.

Beside using Placeholders to hide confidential information, you can also use them for providing frequently used data to your Custom Widgets. Think of for example the BizTalk360 “EnvironmentId”, which is a value which often needs to be provided to Custom Widgets. By creating a Placeholder for the “EnvironmentId”, you can easily re-use it and you don’t need to search for such values, each time you are creating a Custom Widget which needs such a value.

Read this article to know more about creating the place holders and how it can be used in widget.

2. Knockout JS Functions

Frequently, utility functions are used while binding the data to view. In these situations, the user can utilize the BizTalk360 referenced utility functions.

BizTalk Integration API methods returns its responses in XML format. To represent the data in client script(JavaScript/jQuery),it needs to be in JSON format.

x2js = new X2JS({ attributePrefix: '' });
bizTalkHostsList = function () 
{
  var _this = this;
 _this.getBizTalkHosts(function (data) 
  {
   _this.bizTalkHosts(x2js.xml_str2json(data.queryResult));
  });
};

When a view expects the API method to return the result as an array, occasionally a single record is produced. In this situation,the API result needs to be converted to an array. 

x2js = new X2JS({attributePrefix: '', arrayAccessForm:"property", 
arrayAccessFormPaths : ["root.records.record"]});
bizTalkSendPortsList = function () {
      var _this = this;                 
      _this.getbizTalkSendPorts(function (data) 
{
      var results = x2js.xml_str2json(data.queryResult);
      if (Array.isArray(results.root.records.record))
         _this.bizTalkSendPorts(results.root.records.record);
      else {
         _this.bizTalkSendPorts([results.root.records.record]);
         }
      });
   };

3. BizTalk360 Styles and Icons

 The styles of BizTalk360 can be used in custom widgets by inspecting the element in the BizTalk360 Application.  You can take advantage of the listed styles and controls while creating the custom widgets.

CSS Styles

Utilize BizTalk360 in-built CSS in custom widget creation

• List the data in Table: table table-lists
• Scroll Bar: WidgetScroll

<div id=”WidgetScroll” style=”top:30px;” data-bind=”addScrollBar: WidgetScroll, scrollCallback: ‘false'”> 
  <table class=”table table-lists”>
  </table>
</div>

• Success/Info Tag: Use the Success or Information tag based the data to be presented in the list

 <span data-bind="text: HostType == 1 ? 'InProcess' : 'Isolated', css: HostType == 1 ? 'success-tag' : 'info-tag'">
 </span>

Boot Strap

Boot Strap styles and tags could be used during widget creation. BizTalk360 uses Boot Strap styles to design the base layouts.

• Container Fluid
• row
• col-md-*

<div class="container-fluid">
  <div class="row">
    <div class="col-md-8"></div>
    <div class="col-md-4"></div>
  </div> 
</div>

Font Awesome Icons

Users can represent status or any information in graphical way, you can use Font Awesome Icons.

• Success – fa fa-check-circle
• Error – fa fa-power-off
• Warning – fa fa-times-circle

KendoUI Controls

BizTalk360 uses KendoUI controls, users can utilize those controls in widget script

• Drop Down
• Grid
• Switch Box
• DateTime Picker
• Numeric Text Box
• Calendar

// View
<div class="form-group margin-t"> //Boot Strap Form Group
  <div class="col-md-10"> // Boot Strap Column
    <div class="col-md-offset-2">
      <div class="alert alert-info" role="alert"> //Boot Strap Information
        <b>Note :</b> Choose the environment and enable the servers for Event Log data to be collected.
      </div>
      <div class="form-horizontal">
        <div class="form-group" data-bind="validationElement: selectedEnvironment">
          <label class="col-md-3 control-label">Select Environment</label>
          <div class="cus-select" style="text-align: left;">
            <label>
              <select data-bind="options: configuredEnvironments, optionsText: 'name', value: selectedEnvironment" 
               class="form-control" style="min-width:300px;"></select> // Kendo Dropdown
             </label>
           </div>
         </div>
       </div>               
     </div>
   </div>
</div>    
        
//ViewModel     
 selectedEnvironment.subscribe(onEnvironmentChanges, this); // change event to the environment

4. Embedding Third-Party Scripts

BizTalk360 uses a component called High Charts to represent data in graphical way. Also, some of our customers are using the custom widgets to represent their BizTalk Integration in graphical chart. BizTalk360 supports High Charts (Basic Widgets) with High Chart JS.  To reference the third-party scripts, use the following JavaScript to reference the external libraries.

function injectScript(src) {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {       
                for (var i = 0; i < src.length; i++) {
    var script = document.createElement('script');
    script.src = src[i];
    script.async = false; // This is required for synchronous execution
    document.head.appendChild(script);
  }        
        script.addEventListener('load', resolve);
        script.addEventListener('error', () => reject('Error loading script.'));
        script.addEventListener('abort', () => reject('Script loading aborted.'));
        document.head.appendChild(script);
    });
}
injectScript(['https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/highcharts/5.0.14/highcharts-more.js','https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/highcharts/5.0.14/js/modules/solid-gauge.js'])

Customer scenarios

Through our support channel, customers are explaining their scenarios which they require in their day to day activities. Here, we pick few common scenarios that will be useful in BizTalk Integration space.

Monitor Artifacts of a BizTalk application

BizTalk360 has the capability to monitor multiple application artifacts in a single alarm configuration. For instance, a specific group of users wants to monitor the status of specific application artifacts. To achieve this requirement, custom widget creation is one of the possible solutions.  Create the custom widget to monitor an application artifacts status and associate the widget to dashboard. You can download the custom widget of monitoring the application artifacts.

Secure SQL Queries

Secure SQL query is an important feature to fetch data based on the user’s business demand. However, it is hard to create all the possible transaction results out of box from predefined widgets. Custom Widgets will help the BizTalk360 users to address this gap in BizTalk360.

Please follow the article how to create custom widgets using Secure SQL Queries.

Represent the data using Cross Domain API and High Charts

A user wants to represent BizTalk Integration Transaction details in the graphical chart. The Integration API is hosted cross domain. To access the cross-domain API Methods through client script, you need to use the XMLHTTPRequest method

function createCORSRequest(method, url) {
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
 if ("withCredentials" in xhr) {
 // XHR for Chrome/Firefox/Opera/Safari.
 xhr.open(method, url, true);
 } else if (typeof XDomainRequest != "undefined") {
 // XDomainRequest for IE.
 xhr = new XDomainRequest();
 xhr.open(method, url);
 } else {
 // CORS not supported
 xhr = null;
 return xhr;
}
//Make the actual CORS request
function makeCorsRequest(url,method) {
var xhr = createCORSRequest(method, url);
if (!xhr) {
 alert('CORS not supported');
return;
 }
// Response handlers
xhr.onload = function() {
var resultData = xhr.responseText;
expectedResults(x2js.xml_str2json( JSON.parse(resultData).MonitorQueryResult).root.records.record);
 }
 xhr.onerror = function() {
 alert('Woops, there was an error making the request.')
}
 xhr.send();
}
makeCorsRequest(‘https://YOURCROSSDOMAIN/SERVICENAME’,'GET');

In this case, the user wants to represent the data in High Charts solid-gauge pattern . For that, you can use the above mentioned suggestion “Embed Third-Party Script”.

Conclusion

Custom widget is a useful feature to bring the customized solution in a dashboard. Hope this article will be helpful to get start the custom widgets creation. Get started with the free 30 days trial. For any queries/feedback please write to us support@biztalk360.com.

Author: Senthil Kumar Palanisamy

Senthil Kumar Palanisamy is the Technical Lead at BizTalk360 having 14 years of experience in Microsoft Technologies. Worked various products across domains like Health Care, Energy and Retail. View all posts by Senthil Kumar Palanisamy

The post Best Practices to Create Custom Widgets in BizTalk360 appeared first on BizTalkGurus.