Resolving "Unknown Errors" when working with Commerce Server Profile Adapter

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Most of the times, when you encounter an error interacting with Commerce Server Profiles Adapter, the Adapter will give you back an error with a proper description of what might've went wrong. However, there are certain cases when the adapter simply emits a warning in the event log that mentions about an error with "Unknown Error Description".

This one seems quite tough to solve at the first instance, given that we do not have any further information about this. However, most of the times, as I noticed it this is more to do with some missing values in the message or some mis-configured properties on your send port.

To get the actual description of the error that has occured, you can do the following -

  • On the commerce server, create a new Profiles Webservice by inheriting from Microsoft.CommerceServer.Profiles.WebService.ProfilesWebService.
  • Now simply override the ImportProfile and UpdateProfile methods and call the base methods in them.
  • On the Biztalk Server, instead of pointing to the default Commerce Server Profile Webservice, point to your newly created webservice.
  • Then in this webservice, you can put a break-point and see why it fails. The actual exception information will be provided here for all the "Unknown Error Description" issues.

Once you know the reason, then it would definitely be quite easy to deal with it.