EDI Tutorial 5 Video :: BizTalk Server 2010 :: Test the Solution

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The video is available at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/video/gg153514

This is the fifth video of the BizTalk Server 2010 EDI tutorial. In the last video, we created the trading partner agreement to process the EDI messages that will be transferred between business profiles. This video demonstrates how to test the EDI solution by sending EDI messages.

I am pasting the transcript of the video here to increase the search hits.

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This is the fifth video of the BizTalk Server 2010 EDI tutorial. In the last video, we created the trading partner agreement to process the EDI messages that will be transferred between Procurement System and Order System. In this presentation, we will test the EDI solution by sending EDI messages.

Testing the Solution

To test the solution, we just need to drop some messages to the folder where the receive location polls messages. The tutorial files provide a test message, SamplePO.txt. The file is available at C drive… Program Files… Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010… SDK…EDI Interface Developer Tutorial…. Process EDI_Test Locations folder. …

  • The purchase order message from Procurement System will be dropped to fromTHEM folder…
  • The message that reaches OrderSystem will appear in the toOrderSystem folder…
  • The acknowledgement that is sent back to Procurement System will appear in the toTHEM_997 folder….

Make a copy of the SamplePO.txt message….. Drop the copy to the fromTHEM folder….. Wait for the file to disappear….. Check the toOrderSystem folder…… The message has been forwarded to OrderSystem….. Open the message and notice how it’s different from the purchase order message that is sent by Procurement System….. This is because you used a custom send pipeline in the send port created to send the purchase order message to OrderSystem…. The custom pipeline transforms the EDI message into a flat file message…..

Check the toTHEM_997 folder…… The acknowledgement has been sent to Procurement System. Open the acknowledgement message and notice how it is formed:

  • ISA6 and ISA8 in the acknowledgement message are set to US and THEM respectively….. This is opposite to the values of ISA6 and ISA8 in the purchase order message that came from Procurement System….. This is because, for the acknowledgement, the roles are reversed…. Sender of the purchase order message is now the receiver of acknowledgement message…..
  • In the last video, the values you provided on the Envelope page of the Contoso to Fabrikam tab are used to populate the GS-related values….. However, you would notice that values you entered for GS01, GS02, and GS03 are different from the values you see in the acknowledgement message…… This is because, for an acknowledgement message, GS01 is always set to FA (or functional acknowledgement) ….. similarly, GS02 and GS03 are set to the same values as ISA6 and ISA8………

To better understand how agreements govern message processing, let’s tweak some agreement settings and see how it affects the acknowledgement message… Open the agreement dialog box…. On the Contoso to Fabrikam tab, on the CharacterSet and Separators page, change the value of Segment Terminator to an equal to sign…… This value decides what terminator is used at the end of each line…

Similarly, on the Envelopes page, change the value of GS5 to HHMMSS. Save the agreement and restart the BizTalkServerApplication host instance…… For the changes in agreement to take effect, you must restart the host instance.

Drop the SamplePO.txt message in the fromTHEM folder again…… wait for the message to disappear…. Check the toTHEM_997 folder for the acknowledgement message. Notice the two differences….

  • An equal to sign now appears as the segment terminator for each line
  • The value for GS5 now also contains the seconds unit.

If the request messages are not picked up by the File adapter, you need to make sure the receive location status is enabled…. If it is enabled, check if the sample message being dropped is not marked as read-only…. Also, check the application event log…. The error messages are usually very descriptive.

If the request messages are picked up, but the processed messages are not dropped to the destination folders, you need to make sure the send ports are started….. If they’re started, then check the application event log….

This concludes the fifth and the last video of the BizTalk Server 2010 EDI tutorial. Thank you for watching.

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