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

Tips, pitfalls, and troubleshooting


Using RFCs and BAPIs provide BizTalk developers with another tool for our toolboxes. Below is a list of tips, issues, and behaviors that I have run into while integrating with RFCs and BAPIs:

  1. 1. RFCs and BAPIs can handle large amounts of data. While I am not aware of a specific upper limit, I have, by accident, called an RFC that returned over 100 MB of data. This isn't to say that calling an RFC that returns 100 MB is a good idea, but it means that it is possible.

  2. 2. Always check with your SAP counterpart to see if you need to provide leading zeros when providing the ID for a specific object. In our Material walkthrough, we need to provide leading zeros in order for the operation to be called successfully.

  3. 3. When calling an RFC or BAPI, if the response from SAP is missing a particular segment, or re-occurring node, it may be due to the lack of that node being present in the request document. A perfect example of this behavior was the BAPIRET2 node in our...