Phidiax Tech Blog

Step-by-Step BizTalk Auto Scheduler

The following is a list of some solutions for triggering BizTalk processes based on a schedule.

• Sandro Pereira: BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter
• Michael Stephenson: Implementing scheduling requirements in BizTalk solutions
• Maheshkumar S Tiwari: BizTalk Server: Scheduling Orchestration using Trigger Message
• Toon Vanhoutte: BTS 2016 Feature Pack I - Scheduling capabilities
• Microsoft: Configure the time zone and recurrence scheduling in BizTalk Server

I have implemented, in one way or another, most of the approaches outlined in Michael’s article above.

Sandro has created the ultimate Schedule Task solution, but often I work at customers that will not allow any custom code to run in their environment.

At a recent client, we ended up implementing an approach that uses the Scheduling features in BizTalk Server Feature Pack 1or 2 and the WCF SQL Adapter.

Ingredients:

• WCF-SQL Receive Location
• BizTalk Server Feature Pack 1, or preferably, Feature Pack 2 to support time zones

Step-By-Step

1. Create a new WCF-SQL static one-way receive port and associated location.

Notice a critical element--that the Receive Pipeline is a Pass Through Receive. Do not attempt to disassemble this; we are going to throw it away.

2. Create the associated Receive Location.

Now comes the tricky part… the WCF-SQL Configuration.

3. Connect to a database

Go ahead and point at the BizTalk Management Database. The BizTalk Service Account always has access to this, so you won’t need to go through any security configuration.

4. And the tricky part here is, create a polling data available statement that always returns a non-zero value, but never actually hits the database.

Then, create the polling statement that returns something. We don’t care what it is.

PolledDataAvailableStatement: SELECT 1 as PollData

PollingIntervalInSeconds: Set this to about 5 minutes, or something fairly large. We want only one PollStatement to occur during the polling window.

PollingStatement: Select 1 as PollStatement

Ok, so now we have a Receive location that will always fire, at the beginning of a polling window.

Later, we have to carefully make the polling window small, less than the PollingIntervalInSeconds so that it only fires once in the window.

5. Now we configure the Polling Schedule. Here are the default settings.

We need to enable the Schedule. Verify that the Start date is enabled, and is a date prior to the Start that I want to set.

6. In this example, I want this to fire every weekday, at 9:00 AM Central European Standard Time, with an adjustment for Daylight Savings Time:

Now, this schedule will fire only once, at 9:00 AM on a weekday.

The output message is a simple XML statement, that contains the value "1" from the Polling statement. You should have your downstream component fire, consume a generic XML Document, and ignore the content; just run when it receives an event from a message for BTS.ReceiveLocation == "Schedule1 Receive Port".

I believe that this approach handles most of the requirements for scheduling events in BizTalk in a highly reliable, controlled manner.

Here is the list of scenarios from Toon’s article, and I see this approach can handle each one:

• Send a specific message every x seconds / minutes.
• Trigger a process every x seconds / minutes.
• Poll a rest endpoint every x seconds / minutes.