What's the best way to configure ports to route multiple EDI parties through a single AS2 party in BizTalk?

Question

In our use of BizTalk 2009 we do a lot of EDI transmissions. We often have third party groups, VANs, that supply AS2/EDI services to our partners. Because of this I have cases where two partners use the same AS2 settings, but have different EDI settings for each partner.

Currently in these cases I have three parties. One for each partner containing EDI information, and one for the VAN which contains the shared AS2 information. Currently I have two send ports that dump the partner EDI files to a file folder. These send ports are associated with the EDI parties. I then have a receive location that listens for any files in that folder, and a send port linked directly to the receive location's port name. This send port is linked to the AS2 party, and takes care of the transmission piece.

This seems a little less then optimal to me. Are there better practices out there? If nothing else I would really like to keep the messages to the BizTalk Message Box, and not write to the local file system. Is there a way to do this?

What architecture are other people using to solve this problem with using BizTalk?

Answer 1

Instead of using separate send ports and associating them with a party, you have the option of using the EDI and EdiInt context properties instead. Using the context properties allows to managed all of your EDI transactions through a single send port. (Or at lease one send port per VAN)

The properties you'll be interested in are EDI.DestinationPartyName for the EDI party and EdiIntAS.AS2From for the AS2 party. Set these properties either in an orchestration or a custom pipeline component and the pipelines will use them to resolve the party and apply the correct envelopes just like they do with the associated send ports.

I've found this to be a much cleaner solution especially when you have many trading partners.

Party Resolution and Schema Determination for Outgoing EDI Messages - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb259945%28v=bts.10%29.aspx

Party Resolution for Outgoing AS2 Messages - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb246112%28v=bts.10%29.aspx