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The AppFabric Connect feature provides WF developers access to both the BizTalk Mapper and the BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010. This document provides answers to frequently asked questions when using Visual Studio 2010 to develop WF applications that utilize functionality provided by the BizTalk Server 2010 AppFabric Connect feature.
You can either click the “Edit” button on the activity or click on the “BizTalkMapClass” property of the activity. This will allow you to create a new map or select an existing map which matches the types associated with the activity. The existing map can be part of that project or in a referenced assembly.
If a map is already associated with the Mapper activity, to edit the map you can click “Edit” on the Mapper activity. To change the map and associate a different map with the Mapper activity, right-click the Mapper activity and select Properties, then click the "..." button next to BizTalkMapClass in the properties dialog to display the Select a map dialog box. Click the drop-down box next to Select an existing map to select a different map.
This can be done by right-clicking on the activity and selecting the “Refresh Map” menu item. Refreshing the map will update the schemas and launch the map. Note that if any mappings break due to data contract changes (for example a member was renamed), an error message will be displayed. The rest of the mappings will be preserved.
The same map can be used by different Mapper activities in other projects by referencing the generated assembly. In this case the associated artifacts are not deleted when the Mapper activity is deleted.
The Mapper activity decides to use the XmlSerializer only if the type is annotated with the XmlType or XmlRoot attributes. If the activity is an array type, the attribute check will be performed on the array element type as well. In all other cases, DataContractSerializer is used. Note : When creating a map it is possible to use Advanced Options to change the "Serializer to use for Input" and the "Serializer to use for Result" from Auto to DataContractSerializer or XMLSerializer. Manually setting the serializer is not recommended however and extreme caution should be exercised when doing this because specifying the wrong serializer will cause serialization to fail at runtime.
The Mapper activity may throw one or more of the following exceptions:
The mapper activity supports .NET tracing. Depending on the nature of the problem, you will need to set the source appropriately:
If the activity is being generated but the dialog is not being displayed, you may have selected the “Do not show this message again.” option the first time that the dialog box was displayed. This behavior may continue even if you reinstall the application. To modify the behavior to display the dialog box, launch Regedit and then modify the registry to set the value for the entry “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\WCF LOB Adapter SDK\DoNotRemindActivityGenerated” to false.
The LOB activity needs to pass credentials to the adapter so it can connect to the LOB. There are several options available for passing these credentials:
For more information about passing credentials using LOB activities please see the following blog posts:
Every time an activity is generated, several artifacts are generated in the associated proxy file. In certain cases, this can result in compilation errors because of multiple entries for the same artifact. Ensure that you follow the guidelines below to prevent compilation errors when generating multiple activities:
The BAPI call and the commit call must use the same underlying LOB connection. WF doesn't currently support session scope. To work around this behavior, write a custom code activity that invokes both calls from the same proxy instance. For more information about invoking BAPI transactions from a Workflow see the blog post Invoking BAPI Transactions from a Workflow (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2010/07/06/handling-of-bapi-transactions.aspx).
The BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 installs several schemas to the %windir%\system32\inetsrv\config\schemas directory. The schema files that are installed will resemble the format “Microsoft.Adapters.Foo_schema.xml”. Ensure that these schema files are installed and present in the %windir%\system32\inetsrv\config\schemas directory. A couple of reasons that these schema files will not be present include:
Follow these steps to resolve this issue:
Another important place to find a huge amount of BizTalk related articles is the TechNet Wiki itself. The best entry point is BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki Read suggested related topics:
Maheshkumar S Tiwari edited Revision 55. Comment: Added Tag
Richard Mueller edited Revision 46. Comment: Removed (en-US) from title
atconway edited Revision 40. Comment: Made (2) spelling corrections and 1 grammatical error correction: activites -> activities, aontrol -> control, "of the the following" -> "of the following"
Ed Price MSFT edited Revision 38. Comment: Updated title casing.
Nice job
GREAT
Indeed awesoome !!
Nice FAQ makes understanding AppFabric connect feature a lot better understandable.
Hi Trace, any chance you have the full list of "certain restricted keywords" that can't be on the the map class name?