BizTalk Interview Questions And Answers

1. Define Biztalk?
Answer: BizTalk is a Business Process Management server from Microsoft. It is a message based integration tool. Biz Talk enables large enterprises to automate and integrate business processes. This process is done by using adapters that are tailored for communicating among various software systems in an enterprise. It provides functions like Business Process Modeling, Business-to-Business communication, Message broker, EAI, Process automation.

BizTalk enables enterprises for integrating and managing business processes by exchanging various documents such as PO (Purchase Order), Invoices within and across boundaries of enterprises. MS Visual Studio supports development for Biz Talk server.

2. What is the purpose of a Flat File schema?
Answer: A flat file schema defines the structure of a class of instance messages that use a flat-file format, either delimited or positional or some combination thereof. Because the native semantic capabilities of XSD do not accommodate all of the requirements for defining the structure of flat-file instance messages—such as the various types of delimiters that might be used for different records and fields within the flat file. BizTalk Server uses the annotation capabilities of XSD to store this extra information within an XSD schema. BizTalk Server defines a rich set of specific annotation tags that can be used to store all of the required additional information. See MSDN Different Types of BizTalk Schemas.

3. What are the functions of BizTalk?
Answer: It provides some fundamentals functions like Business Practice Modeling, B2B Communication, Process Automation, and EAI. BizTalk helps enterprises to integrate and manage various processes by exchanging various documents like Purchase Order, Invoicing within and across the boundaries of the organization.

4. What is trading partner management in BizTalk?
Answer: Information workers manage trading partner relations within organizations. Business Activity Services include a Trading Partner Agreement Component to allow them to do accordingly. TPM databases preserve information about trading relations. Information workers create and modify the agreements with trading partners who use BizTalk Server.

5. Define Content-Based Routing?
Answer: Content-based Routing offers the flexibility for users who prefer to route messages based on the envelope or on receive port configuration properties. Routing can be carried out based on information contained in the envelope of the file or even configuration information from the receive location. Any BizTalk server business process involves receiving, processing and sending messages. Some messages do not require intensive processing in orchestration. They can benefit from an effortless and efficient solution better known as Content-based routing.

6. Explain The Difference Between Biztalk Server And Web Services?
Answer:

  • BizTalk is a product while Web Services are a standard.
  • BizTalk Server is a Microsoft product whereas Web Services have been developed by many organizations including Microsoft, IBM, etc.
  • BizTalk Server application has been built to enable the internal business processes of organizations, operate with ease.
  • Web Services are small applications published using UDDI to enable all the people to find them. Web services are that they are platform-neutral.
  • BizTalk can leverage Web services.

7. What are the maps?
Answer: Maps are graphical representations of XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) documents that allow us to perform, in a simple and visual manner, transformations between XML messages. A map file basically is the XML file that defines the correspondence between the records and fields in one schema and the records and fields in another schema. You create a map when you want to transform or translate data that you receive or send from one schema to another.

8. How are messages created in an orchestration?
Answer: You construct a message any time that you introduce a message into your orchestration, either by receiving it or by assigning values to a message variable. There are several ways to create a new instance of a message in an orchestration.

9. Which scope compensation block can be added?
Answer: A scope configured as Atomic or Long-running can have compensation blocks added, but scopes that are configured with no Transaction type cannot.

10. Can we prevent Orchestration from entering a suspended state?
Answer: Any exception which is not caught within the exception handlers of the orchestration causes the orchestration instance to be moved to the Suspended state. By applying the appropriate error handling in an orchestration it can be prevented entering the Suspended state.

11. Where is BTS? SPID and BTS. Receive Port ID used?
Answer: It is used in Specify Later port binding option. In this model, the orchestration ports are bound to messaging ports using BTS. SPID,BTS. Receive report ID or other related properties.

12. What are the ways to add properties in context?
Answer: Promoting a node to a property field means to make a node value available in the context of the message. (Company) Adapters and pipeline components write in the context.

13. How To Use The Message Types?
Answer: Right-click Messages in the Orchestration View tab to create a new message, you have four choices for the Message Type property. 
Expand Multi-part Message Types and then choose to Create New Multi-part Message Type.
Name your multi-part message type then expand it so you can see its Message-part_1 member (Biz-talk suggested a name).

14. What Biztalk Enables For Companies? 
Answer: BizTalk enables companies to integrate and manage business processes by exchanging business documents between business applications within or across organizational boundaries.

15. What is a distinguished field in BizTalk server?
Answer: A pipeline is required to write Distinguished Field in the message when it is being received on a port. Dis-assembler pipeline component such as XML and flat file disassemble does the task of writing the message context by the pipeline. In addition to it, custom pipeline component might be performing the task too. 

16. Explain the difference between Routing and Content Routing?
Answer: Message routing is a technique of passing through BizTalk without being processed, whereas content routing is the technique of the message which is based on certain field value of the schema.

17. Define BizTalk and its functions?
Answer: BizTalk is a Business Process Management Server system from Microsoft and is basically a message-based integration tool. With this server system, large enterprises can automate and integrate its organizational procedures. This has been made possible by customizing the communication system among various software systems of an organization. It provides some fundamentals functions like Business Practice Modeling, B2B Communication, Process Automation, and EAI. BizTalk helps enterprises to integrate and manage various processes by exchanging various documents like Purchase Order, Invoicing within and across the boundaries of the organization. 

18. Explain the differences between the BizTalk server and Web services?
Answer:

1. BizTalk is a service while a Web service is standard for ethical practice.

2. BizTalk is a service rendered by Microsoft whereas Web Services is developed by many organizations.

3. BizTalk is an application built for an enhancing the efficiency of an organization’s internal operations, whereas Web services are a small application using UDDI so that general users may access them as and when they are in need.

4. A service like BizTalk is empowered by Web services, whereas Web services are a neutral platform.

19. What is BAM used for?
Answer: BAM is used to monitor business milestones and key metrics in near real-time throughout a process in BizTalk.

20. What are the challenges you have faced using Soap Adapter?
Answer: Twenty minutes timeout issue. You have to host web services in the same machine. There is a way I heard but I didn’t do much reading on it.

21. Ordered delivery on send port has a serious performance impact, why?
Answer: Because only one thread can submit messages through the port and each message has to wait for messages through the port and each message has to wait for the message before it can be processed. 

22. What is the Difference between an Isolated host and an In-Process host?
Answer: The difference between an Isolated host and an In-Process is that an Isolated host must run under another process, in most cases IIS, and an In-Process host is a complete BizTalk service alone. Additionally, since In-Process hosts exist outside of the BizTalk environment, the BizTalk Administration Tools are not able to determine the status of these hosts (stopped, started or starting).

Security is also fundamentally different in an Isolated host versus an In-Process host. In-Process hosts must run under an account that is within the In-Process host’s Windows group, and do not maintain security context within the Messagebox. Isolated hosts are useful when a service already exists that will be receiving messages either by some proprietary means or by some other transport protocol such as HTTP. In this case, the Isolated host only runs one instance of the End Point Manager and is responsible for receiving messages from its transport protocol and sending them to the Messagebox through the EPM. 

23. What is the maximum number of branches that can be used in a parallel shape?
Answer: There are no limitations on the number of branches which can be used in a parallel shape.

24. What is binding?
Answer: The term binding refers to the configuration of orchestration ports in order to control the creation of subscriptions and/or promoted properties. Binding is used to control how messages will be routed to or from orchestration ports by the subscription mechanism.

25. What is the basic flow of messages in Biztalk Server engine?
Answer:

Receive Port: 

listens for messages.

Adapters information interchange with external systems

Pipeline, dis-assembler, and sub-components: normalizing the schemas (wire message in its native format) of the internal messages using XML as the common language.

MessageBox: internal XML messages are published here and then are further consumed by Subscribers.
Subscribers (Send Port and Orchestration components): subscribe to internal messages per metadata or message context properties.

When the subscribed orchestration finishes processing the internal messages are re-published in the MessageBox to be consumed by other subscribers.

Send Port: consumes the internal XML messages, converts them to wire messages through the associated pipeline and subcomponent Assembler.

Finally, the adapter is used to convey the wire message to the target system.

26. When working with Schemas, Maps, Pipelines, and Orchestrations, how should the projects be structured?
Answer:

  • Schemas and Maps in its own project
  • Or Schemas and Maps together in its own project
  • Orchestrations in its own project
  • Pipelines in its own project

27. What Is The Default Mapping For Auto Mapping?
Answer: The default mapping for Auto Mapping is mapping by structure. This can be changed to by node name in the map properties.

28. How do you achieve First-In-First-Out message processing of messages received from multiple sources using an Orchestration?
Answer:

  • Use a Sequential Convoy to process the messages in the order they are received into the Message Box.
  • Make sure Ordered Delivery is set to True inside the Orchestration Receive Port.

29. Describe the purpose of BAM in BizTalk Server?
Answer: Purpose of deriving up-to-date metrics and key performance indicators from BAM databases, Business integration tools are used. The forecasting of process trends by uses and monitors processes in a real-time scenario is done by using BI tools. Users get alerts for situations which need their intervention for preventing undesirable outcome for encouraging beneficial results, a mechanism is provided by BAM. 

30. Define BizTalk Server Convoy and correlation sets?
Answer: BizTalk server detects the potential for specific race conditions, which ensures that all correlated messages are received by the same orchestration instance. The potentiality of these race conditions is sensed by the BizTalk server. These messages are treated as a convoy. All such messages which match with the general subscription are evaluated against the convoy set and the matched convoys are routed through an existing port

31. What is the Correlation in BizTalk servers?
Answer: An orchestration can have more than one instance running simultaneously. Even though each of those multiple instances performs the same action, it does it on different data contained within a message. Correlation is a process of associating an incoming message with the appropriate instance of an orchestration. For example, if your orchestration issues a purchase order, receives an invoice and sends a payment, the developer must make certain that the invoice message is received by the orchestration instance which corresponds to the orchestration that sent the purchase order. Without correlation, it would be possible to send out an invoice for thousands of items even though the purchase order is for one. And each correlation is based on a set of properties known as correlation types.

32. Lists some of the Artifacts of BizTalk server?
Answer:

1. Hat
2. BAM
3. Adapter
4. Pipeline
5. Orchestrations
6. Role Links
7. Send Ports and Send Port Groups
8. Receive Ports
9. Receive Locations
10. Policies
11. Schemas
12. Maps
13. Resources
14. Business Activity Servers.

33. How rules engine is provided in BizTalk server?

Answer: Rules engine is provided as a component of a business rules management system, which provides the abilities such as to define, register, classify and manage all rules, verifies the consistency of rules definitions, defining relationships among rules and relates them to IT applications which are affected by one or more rules.

34. How to version your schema?
Answer:

  • Side by side versioning in BizTalk 2004 Configure any pipeline components to use a specific version of the schema. If the schema is redeployed under a different version and this is not done it will fail because it looks up by target namespace/root element, not by assembly. Deploy the new version. Bind the orchestrations. The Manual steps are below. Disable the receive location
  • Unenlist the old version using the Explorer (do not stop it), this will prevent new instances from starting while allowing old ones to finish
  • Enlist the new version and start it, all new instances will be created using this one.
  • Enable the receive location

35. Is there an error handling functionality to handle error on pipelines?
Answer: Yes. Error-handling functionality called error reporting which enables handling pipeline errors. Error reporting is specified on receive and send ports within the BizTalk Administration console.

36. Where and how did you use Web Services in Orchestration?
Answer: We can use web services where we need to get data from multiple sources in one go. For e.g. getting a price quotes from 10 different vendors. You make one orchestration and use WS inside it.

37. What is debating in BizTalk?

Answer: Recently I ended up in a scenario where I need to debauch a message inside the orchestration to produce multiple messages based on XPATH. (BizTalk Interview Questions And Answers)

38. What is BAM?
Answer: Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is a collection of tools that allow you to manage aggregations, alerts, and profiles to monitor relevant business metrics (called Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs). It gives you end-to-end visibility into your business processes, providing accurate information about the status and results of various operations, processes, and transactions so you can address problem areas and resolve issues within your business.

The BAM Framework provides an easy, real-time, transaction-consistent way to monitor heterogeneous business applications and to present data for SQL queries and aggregated reports (OLAP). Through queries and aggregations, you can include not only the data that is present during the running business process but also the state and the dynamics of the running business process, independent of how the business is automated.

39. What is BizTalk Business Rule Engine?
Answer: The Business Rules Framework is a Microsoft .NET-compliant class library. It provides an efficient inference engine that can link highly readable, declarative, semantically rich rules to any business objects (.NET components), XML documents, or database tables.

Application developers can build business rules by constructing rules from small building blocks of business logic (small rule sets) that operate on information (facts) contained in .NET objects, database tables, and XML documents. This design pattern promotes code reuse, design simplicity, and modularity of business logic.

40. What is BRE Importance Note?
Answer:

  • BRE is available only in license BizTalk Server.
  • Document Type of schema should be the same as a fully qualified schema name.
  • We can set priority for rules execution if more than one rule.
  • A higher number means higher priority.
  • There are only if-then and no else condition
  • When a new version of the policy is deployed, you should wait approximately 60 seconds before testing. The rule engine update service polls the rule engine database on a periodic basis (every 60 seconds by default) to look for newly deployed policies.
  • A policy or vocabulary cannot be modified after it is published.

41. What is a zombie message in BizTalk?
Answer: A zombie message is a message that was routed to a running orchestration from the message box and was “in-flight” when the orchestration ended. An “in-flight” message is a message that has been routed to a service instance and so is in a message box queue destined for the service instance. Since the message can no longer be consumed by the subscribing orchestration instance, the message is suspended and marked with a ServiceInstance/State value of “Suspended (Non-resumable)”.

A zombie service instance is an instance of an orchestration which has completed while a message that was routed to the orchestration instance from the message box was still “in-flight”. Since the orchestration instance has ended, it cannot consume the “in-flight” messages and so is suspended and marked with a ServiceInstance/State value of “Suspended (Non-resumable)”.

42. Is it possible to have a global variable in a map?
Answer: Yes. The choosing inline code allows us to declare global variables outside the method declaration. These are accessible throughout the map from within all inline code scripting functoids.

43. What is the BizTalk Mapper Designer and where I can find it?
Answer: It is a tool that runs within the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET environment after you install BizTalk Server. We use the Mapper to create and edit maps. 

44. What is message metadata?
Answer: The message metadata is called Context Properties and on receiving the message, both the adapter and the pipeline will add information to the context.

45. How Orchestration does subscribe to messages?
Answer: In Orchestration, the first Receive shape is responsible for creating a subscription. Following two properties are involved in it.

Message: This tells what message this Orchestration is subscribing to

Activate: This tells to consume the message when finding in a MessageBox

46. What is the difference between written property and promoted property?
Answer: Promoted properties can be used as criteria in message routing while written properties cannot. Property field is a Promoted Property in the context. The distinguished field is a written property in the context.

47. How to Promote Property inside an Orchestration?
Answer: The Orchestration cannot promote the properties to message context by default like pipelines can do by using the msg. Context. Promote() method. Inside Orchestration, one has to create a correlation set and initialize that correlation set while publishing the message. Then the BizTalk Engine will promote the property to the message context.

48. What is the difference between Group Max occurs, Group Min Occurs and Max occurs, Min Occurs?
Answer: These are all node properties. See MSDN Node Properties.

Group Max Occurs: Specifies the maximum number of times that to the underlying group content of the selected All Group node can occur.

Group Min Occurs: Specifies the minimum number of times that the underlying group content of the selected All Group node can occur.

Max Occurs: Specifies the maximum number of times that the element corresponding to the selected Record node can occur.

Min Occurs: Specifies the minimum number of times that the element corresponding to the selected Record node can occur.

49. Difference between Flat File Schema and XML schema?
Answer: A flat file schema defines the structure of a class of instance messages that use a flat-file format, either delimited or positional or some combination thereof. Because the native semantic capabilities of XSD do not accommodate all of the requirements for defining the structure of flat-file instance messages—such as the various types of delimiters that might be used for different records and fields within the flat file—BizTalk Server uses the annotation capabilities of XSD to store this extra information within an XSD schema. BizTalk Server defines a rich set of specific annotation tags that can be used to store all of the required additional information.

Different Types of BizTalk Schemas: An XML Schema is basically a contract of your message and defines it. The XML Schema definition (XSD) language defines the structure of an XML instance message, and this is the intended purpose of XSD, such schemas use XSD in a straightforward way.

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