Book Image

Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration

Book Image

Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration

Overview of this book

Microsoft BizTalk is an integration and connectivity server solution that allows businesses to connect disparate systems easily. In today’s business climate of mergers and acquisitions, more and more enterprises are forced to exchange data across disparate Line of Business systems using integration brokers like BizTalk Server 2010. What is often overlooked when integrating these systems is the pre-requisite knowledge that ERP and CRM systems demand in order to effectively integrate them. No longer is this knowledge locked up in the heads of expensive consultants. Gain an edge within your organization by developing valuable skills in the area of Line of Business integration from this book.This book will show you how to integrate BizTalk with Line of Business systems using practical scenarios. Each chapter will take a Line of Business system, introduce some pre-requisite knowledge and demonstrate how you can integrate BizTalk with that Line of Business system, and then provide guidance based upon real world experience, taking your BizTalk knowledge further.This book will enable you to master how to integrate BizTalk with Line of Business systems effectively. The book starts by highlighting the technical foundation of WCF-LOB adapters and the common steps and important properties pertaining to popular WCF-LOB adapters. You will then move on to an overview of how to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server using the WCF based SQL Server adapter. The book then dives into topics such as integrating BizTalk Server with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, building BizTalk/SAP integrated solutions using IDocs, the differences between IDocs and RFCs/BAPIs, and integrating BizTalk with Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus amongst others.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Synchronous walkthrough example—currency exchange rates


The best way to understand the behavior and setup required to use the Dynamics AX BizTalk adapter is to walk through a full example. A common requirement for many companies that use Dynamics AX is to populate the currency exchange rates. Typically, this needs to be daily when the closing rates are published. The Exchange Rates(General ledger | Setup Exchange rates) table in AX is not a shared table across companies, thus depending how your organization is set up; you may or may not need to populate the Exchange rate table using multiple companies with multiple rates. We'll further explain this shortly in the following example. We've found this to be an excellent practical example to begin with when learning to create integration applications with BizTalk and the Dynamics AX AIF module.

For this example, we are going to assume that we have twocompanies in our Dynamics AX implementation; one that is Canadian Dollar (CAD) based, and one...