ESB Toolkit How To Video #7: A SharePoint Adapter Provider

  • Article

Welcome to #7 in my series of ESB Toolkit How To Videos. If you have not seen the previous videos, I encourage you to do so. The previous ones can be found here

1) Basic Itinerary Routing and UDDI Integration

2) Composite Itinerary and Dynamic Mapping

3) Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

4) Dynamic Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

5) Including Custom Orchestrations in the Itinerary Designer

6) Performance Metrics using Built in BAM

One very common thing that people will want the ESB to do is to route message to SharePoint where they can potentially kick off human based workflow. However, the base ESB Toolkit does not have an adapter provider for Windows SharePoint Services. BizTalk does have an "Adapter" for WSS, however the ESB toolkit does not have an "Adapter provider" for WSS. The Adapter Providers in the ESBT bridge between the new ESBT code and the traditional BizTalk components.

Now fortunately, the ESBT can be extended very quickly and we can add in our own adapter providers without the need for very much code at all. This past week, I was working with the guys over at QuickLearn to build out a WSS adapter provider that they planned to use in an upcoming BizTalk/ESBT demo.  In this video, I'll show you how we created the adapter provider (using only a few lines of code) and how we registered it so that the design time tools and the runtime engine could use it. Now, while creating the adapter doesn't require much effort, I will admit that I had a hell of a time trying to get it registered properly and all of the associated configuration files aligned correctly.  The ESBT relies heavily on reflection to load components at runtime, so if you don't name your component properly or register it correctly in the config files, then the ESBT engine won't be able to load the provider properly and you'll have a fun time trying to debug just exactly what you did wrong.

In order to make it easier for you, I've included my code and configuration files for download so that you don't have to rebuild everything that I show in the video.

I need to credit Nick Hauenstein over at QuickLearn (https://www.quicklearn.com/) for doing most of the initial leg work on building this out.

You can access the video here

You can download the project here

Cheers and keep on BizTalking

Peter