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BizTalk Server: Tracking Dependencies Between Artifacts

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Introduction

One of the new out of the box features of BizTalk Server 2013 is the ability to track dependencies between artifacts. The BizTalk Server Administration console provides a UI-driven experience to see how different BizTalk Server artifacts such as orchestrations, send ports, receive locations etc. are dependent on each other. This feature was not present in the previous BizTalk versions. The only way to see how the BizTalk Server artifacts depend on each other is by means of executing queries against the BizTalk Management Database.

BizTalk Server 2013

The dependencies between artifacts can be seen by selecting the artifact in the BizTalk administration console and then click view dependencies in right pane under selected item (See MSDN Tracking Dependencies Between Artifacts in a BizTalk Server Application). What happens in the background is that the dependency information of the artifact will be gathered for you and presented within the Group Hub page at the bottom pane.


Picture 1. Orchestration Dependencies (click on picture to enlarge).

You can then click on one of the dependencies like for instance receive ports.

Picture 2. Receive Port Dependencies (click on picture to enlarge).

This example is just illustrative of what the dependency tracking can do for you.

Previous BizTalk versions

The same result can be achieved by executing a query in the BizTalk Management Database. However you will have to develop all these queries yourself. To give you an impression how it looks see the screenshot below:

Picture 3. SQL Server View of a Receive Port Dependency (click on picture to enlarge).

Since the decency viewer capabilities lacks in previous versions of BizTalk you have to come up with your own custom solution to have same functionality. Alternative of building your own solution is buying a product like BizTalk360 that has this capability (Search and Action) and many others on board.

See Also

For more information on dependency feature of BizTalk Server see the following resources:

Another important place to find an extensive amount of BizTalk related articles is the TechNet Wiki itself. The best entry point is BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki.