Send notifcation if expected message did not arrive in BizTalk

Question

I have a BizTalk receive port monitoring an FTP location. I expect a file to arrive at least once per day in that location and for BizTalk to pick it up and kick off an orchestration. This part is working fine.

However, sometimes the sender fails to send a message during a day, in which case I want an email to sent to notify the users that something is amiss.

I could solve this outside of BizTalk, by creating a daily job that looks in our database for processed files and makes sure there is at least one in any given day. However, I'd prefer to solve this "in line" with the BizTalk solution that is already in place, and not deploy a separate, unrelated job which will increase maintenance headaches.

Is there any functionality in BizTalk that would allow me to send a notification if a receive port doesn't receive something in a given timeframe?

Answer 1

Short answer: Not really.

The logic you want to implement would require a customised version of the FTP Adapter. Depends on how comfortable you are rolling up your sleeves and getting into the Adapter SDK.

If you wanted to keep your solution "Purely BizTalk", you could set up a secondary Orchestration using a SQL Receive Location tied to a stored procedure. This stored procedure executes regularly and looks for records in your "Processed File" table received in the past (business) day. If none are found, it fabricates a record and returns it via the SQL Receive Location. This would be your trigger to send the email notification.

Answer 2

One solution, not elegant though, is to have a secondary FILE receive location, with a schedule window, outside your cutoff time.

Failure scenario:

In this FILE receive location, you have an intelligent/dummy message conforming to the same schema as FTP receive. The intelligent part is to have one of the fields in the message telling us when was the last time we received the file from FTP. The rest of the content is dummy.

Within your orchestration, you check where you received your file from. If its the secondary receive location (using the context property BTS.ReceiveLocationName), you check the date field of this dummy/intelligent message and if it is in past 24 hours ( or similar logic) send an email notifying you did not receive the file from the upstream FTP process and also save a copy of the dummy message (received) back to the secondary FILE receive location unchanged.

Success Scenario:

Apart from normal processing, you save a copy of the dummy/intelligent message to the secondary FILE receive location, with the datetime field reflecting when you processed the file you received from FTP receive location.

Initialising:

You start with a dummy/intelligent message in the secondary FILE receive location with the datetime field value well in the past ( assuming we never received the file from FTP) or with yesterday's date ( assuming we received a file successfully from FTP the day before.)

Overview: Your orchestration has two trigger points.

1. When you receive a file via FTP
2. A scheduled FILE receive location, triggered after the cut-off time.