BizTalk 2009 : Wcf Adapters: Standardizing Your Integration Endpoints - Using the WCF-WSHttp Adapter

7/1/2011 6:27:19 PM

Now that we've covered a lot of the concepts with WCF, let's apply them to how BizTalk WCF adapters are configured. The BizTalk Administration tool provides a specific user interface to customize the WCF-BasicHttp, WCF-WSHttp, and WCF-NetTcp adapter properties.

1. Binding Configuration Options

The Binding configuration tab in Figure 1 shows the default configuration.

Figure 1. WCF-WSHttp default binding configuration

The open, close, and send timeouts default to one minute each. One minute may not be enough under certain circumstances. For example, you might have a synchronous service call that executes an orchestration that lasts longer than one minute.

The timeouts in Figure 1 are not just for the orchestration time. The time starts once WCF has submitted a call to the Messagebox, which means you'll need to take into consideration your "warm-up" time as well. Depending on your hardware, that warm-up time alone may be longer than a minute.

2. Security Configuration

The Security configuration tab shown in Figure 2 allows you to modify how the endpoint will be secured for authentication.

Figure 2. WCF-WSHttp security configuration

The default security mode is Message with a credential type of Windows, meaning WCF will require the consumer of the service to attach their Windows credential token as part of the message.

You can change the Security Mode drop-down to either None, Transport, Message, or TransportWithMessageCredential. Depending on the option you choose, either the Transport section or the Message section will be enabled. When choosing Message authentication, two additional check boxes are available that affect authentication: Negotiate Service Credential and Establish Security Context. The Negotiate Service Credential option tells BizTalk whether the service credential is negotiated automatically between the client and the service. The Establish Security Context option specifies whether a security context token is established through a WS-SecureConversation exchange between this send port and the service. If this check box is selected, then the destination service must support WS-SecureConversation.

Depending on the message credential type, the Negotiate Service Credential option has different implementations. Check the MSDN documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb226397.aspx for more information.

3. Message Options

The Messages tab of the WCF adapter provides the ability to customize which components of a SOAP message get stored in the message box for processing. By default, the entire <soap:body> will be stored, but you can customize your adapter to extract only certain sections of a request.

Figure 3 shows the default properties for the Messages tab.

Figure 3. WCF-WSHttp Receive Adapter default message properties

Table 1 describes the options available in the Messages tab shown in the figure.

Table 1. Message Tab Options
Grouping	Option	Description
Inbound	Envelope	The entire SOAP envelope from the message is imported. The body is ignored.
	Body	This is the default option. The entire body of the message will be used as the message. If the body contains more than one element, then the first element is imported.
	Path	An XPath query will be used to identify the element to be imported.
	Body Path Expression	The XPath query to the element to be imported. This expression is evaluated from the immediate child of the <soap:body>. If the result contains more than one element, then the first element is imported. If you plan on doing content-based routing, then this element must match an entire schema deployed to BizTalk
	Node Encoding	Specifies the type of encoding the adapter will use to decode the text. Options include Base64, Hex, String, or XML (default).
Outbound	Body	Specifies the output message will be used as the SOAP body. This option is available only on a request-response receive location.
	Template	Provides a template for the contents of the SOAP body message. This option is available only on a request-response receive location.
Error Handling	Suspend message on failure	When chosen, the message will be suspended if the request fails because of a pipeline or routing failure.
	Include exception in faults	When chosen and an exception occurs, the error details will be included as part of the SOAP fault message. This option is useful for debugging but should be turned off in production environments.