BizTalk Management Desk

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The BizTalk Management Desk is used to create, establish, and maintain relationships within a corporation and between a corporation and its partners. These relationships are built on agreements, which are rules that determine how information is exchanged. Each agreement has a source organization and a destination organization, or an internal organization and one of its applications. The first step in creating an agreement is designating a default organization, which can be either the source or the destination for every agreement. Applications can also be either the source or the destination, but not both. If an application is used, it must be part of the default organization. There must be at least one document definition defining which documents the source can send to the destination. An open agreement means that either the receiver or the sender, but not both, are open. An open-source agreement always has the designated default organization as its destination organization; an open-destination agreement always has the designated default organization as its source organization.

An agreement defines the movement of information in one direction. If the default organization is the source, it is an outbound agreement. If the default organization is the destination, it is an inbound agreement. Outbound agreements oversee the movement of information out of BizTalk Server 2000, and inbound agreements control the movement of information into BizTalk Server 2000.

Using BizTalk Management Desk

In this section, we are going to look at how BizTalk Management Desk works. Follow these steps:

  1. Click the Start button, point to Programs, Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000, and then choose Microsoft BizTalk Management Desk. You will see a Help window displayed that describes the steps you need to take in order to move information between corporations. The first time you use the BizTalk Management Desk, you'll need to select a default organization.
  2. In the upper right corner, click the Select button in the Default Organization box. This will bring up the Select An Organization screen. If you do not have an organization yet, click New. This will bring up the Organization Editor. For this example, we'll create an organization for Northwind Traders Corporation.
  3. In the General Tab, type Northwind Traders for the Organization Name in the Organization Identifiers section. In the Identifiers tab you will see that there already is a default Organization identifier named Organization. All organizations get this default, do not delete or change it. You can create as many identifiers as you want, but if you are using an X12 format, you should create a two-character identifier as the default.
  4. To create a new identifier, type NWT in the Value field of the Identifier tab, and check Set As Default.
  5. Click Refresh to add the new value to the list of identifiers.

NOTE
BizTalk Management Desk also allows you to create custom names with a qualifier and to associate applications with the default organizations, but we will not go into this in this example. Refer to the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 Help file for the detailed information.

  1. Click OK in the Organization Editor, and then click OK in the Select An Organization box. You should see Northwind Traders listed as the default organization.
  2. The next step is to create an agreement. On the File menu click New, and then click Agreement. This will bring up the Agreement Editor. We will make this a movement of information within the Northwind Traders Corporation from its central location to its European location.
  3. Type Northwind Traders Europe in the Agreement Name field in the Agreement Editor.
  4. Click the Destination icon. This will bring up the Select An Organization screen again.
  5. Click New, and create an organization called Northwind Traders Europe. In the Identifiers tab, give it a value of NWTE, and set this as the default. Once you have created Northwind Traders Europe, select it as the destination.

Now that we've created the agreement , the next step will be to create a document definition. A document definition provides a reference to a specification, which can be created using BizTalk Editor. The outbound and inbound documents will both be associated with a document definition. A pipeline connects the document definition of an outbound document with the document definition of an inbound document. Pipelines are defined in agreements and distribution lists.

You can use the predefined document definitions, or you can use a specification, such as one that is created with BizTalk Editor, to create a new definition. To create a new definition, from the View menu, choose Document Definitions. This will open the Document Definitions Viewer. You can use any specification that is published to a server. For this example, click New to display the Document Definition Editor screen. Click Browse in the Document Definition Editor screen, choose Microsoft, and then choose Common PO.xml in the local server. Type CommonPO.xml in the Document Definition Name field. You can select the Tracking tab if you want to log any of the fields. You can add two of the following types of fields to log: integer, real, date, and text. You can select multiple fields as a custom data type. These fields will become an XML concatenated string. You can only track fields that have a data type specified. You can use the information that is logged to perform tracking of certain business operations. The quantity field for a particular item or the total for purchase orders are two examples of fields that you might want to track and could use to perform an analysis of various business processes.

You can also add selection criteria in the Document Definition Editor. BizTalk Server 2000 determines what document definition to associate a document with by getting information from the document. For X12 and EDIFACT documents, it is not possible to obtain this information from the document. Thus, the information concerning which document definition to use must be placed in the functional group header of the X12 or EDIFACT document. The selection criteria is used to uniquely identify the document definition when processing an inbound EDI document. The selection criteria can also be used to create functional group header information for outbound EDI document envelopes. When working with X12 and EDIFACT, you'll need to add the following selection criteria: application_sender_code, application_receiver_code, and functional_identifier. The X12 format will also need the standards_version selection criteria, and the EDIFACT will need the standards_version_type and the standards_version_value selection criteria. We will not add any selection criteria for tracking, therefore just click OK in the Document Definition Editor and then click Close on the Document Definition Viewer. Next, go to the Agreement Editor and click on the Document Definition icon. This will bring up the Select Document Definition screen. Click on the CommonPO.xml file that you just selected and then click Add. Click OK. You should now see that the text below the Document Definition icon reads Complete.

You will now need to select a Transport method. Click on the Transport icon. This will bring up the Transport screen. In this screen, select a transport type. For this example, select HTTP. For the Address field, type http://localhost, where localhost is the name of your local server. Then click OK to close the Transport screen.

At this point, we have completed all the required steps for creating agreements. There are some optional things we can do. We can create an envelope that creates headers and sometimes footers for the document. BizTalk Server 2000 currently supports Custom XML, ANSI X12, UN/EDIFACT and flat file (either delimited or positional) envelope formats. You can also create your own custom envelope formats.

We will not create an envelope or set security properties in this example, so you can now click Save in the Agreement Editor to open the Save As screen. Click Save Agreement as Complete and then click OK. In the BizTalk Management Desk you can see that this is an outbound agreement because the default organization is the sender.

Now let's create an inbound agreement:

  1. On the File menu, click New, and then choose Agreement. This will bring up the Agreement Editor. Name the agreement Internal Order.
  2. Click the Source icon to open the Select An Organization screen. In this screen, click New to open the Organization Editor.
  3. In the Organization Editor, type Northwind Traders Order Dept for the Organization Name field.
  4. Click the Identifiers tab, type NWTOD for the value, and then click Set As Default. Click Refresh, and then click OK in the Organization Editor. Close the Select An Organization screen.
  5. In the Agreement Editor, click the Source icon to open the Select An Organization screen. In this screen, choose the Northwind Traders Order Dept and then click OK.
  6. Click the Document Definition icon to open the Select Document Definition screen. In this screen, choose CommonPO.xml and then click OK.
  7. Click the Transport icon, choose HTTP for the Transport Type field, and then type http://localhost. The destination should be Northwind Traders.
  8. Click Save to open the Save As screen. Choose the Save Agreement As Complete option. You should now see that this agreement is listed as an inbound agreement in the BizTalk Management Desk.

Pipelines

Pipelines connect an inbound agreement to an outbound agreement. For example, you could have an inbound agreement created from an order application that takes orders and sends them to BizTalk Server 2000. Once they arrive on BizTalk Server 2000, an outbound agreement is used to send these orders to a distributor. The connection of the inbound and outbound agreements creates a pipeline.

To create a pipeline, you must always select the outbound agreement first. Click on the Northwind Traders Europe Outbound agreement. On the File menu, choose New, and then choose Pipeline. The Pipeline Editor opens in the lower-right pane of the BizTalk Management Desk. In this example, orders will be sent from the Internal Orders department to BizTalk Server 2000 and then forwarded to the European offices. We will use the two agreements we have created to do this.

In the Pipeline Editor, type PO Pipeline as the pipeline name. Click the Inbound Agreement icon to open the Select An Inbound Agreement screen. Choose Northwind Internal, and then choose CommonPO.xml as the inbound and outbound document definitions. Click Save. To view the pipeline you have created, go to the View menu and choose Pipeline. This will open the Pipeline Viewer, where you can view the available pipelines.

Distribution Lists

A distribution list consists of a set of complete outbound agreements that you can use to send the same document to a group of different trading partner organizations. A distribution list can support only one outbound document definition. When a distribution list is created, the default organization automatically becomes the source organization. To create a distribution list, on the File menu, click New, and then click Distribution List to open the Distribution List Editor. Type Northwind Distribution List for the Distribution List Name field. Click the Browse button and select the CommonPO.xml document definition in the Select An Outbound Document Definition screen. Click OK. This will enable the Refresh button for the agreements. In the Distribution List Editor, click Refresh. The only outbound agreement that we have created is Northwind Traders Europe. Click this agreement in the Available Agreements window and click Add. If we had other agreements, we could add them, too. Click OK.



Developing XML Solutions
Developing XML Solutions (DV-MPS General)
ISBN: 0735607966
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 115
Authors: Jake Sturm

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