Applications in BizTalk 2006 for me are just logical buckets that allow you place like-minded artifacts (maps, schemas, orchestrations etc.) together, so your environment when viewed through the BizTalk Admin Console looks clean and tidy and can be easily managed.
Although resources (BizTalk Assemblies) and ports can be moved between applications, they cannot exist in multiple applications at the same time*, so is it possible to have one application respond to events caused another application? Yes it is, through cross-application subscription.
If you create the most basic of subscriptions: a receive port/location and a send port, subscribed to the receive port on the ReceivePortName property; stop the send port (but leave it enlisted) and push a message through. The message will suspend because it is waiting for the send port to be started, but this gives us an opportunity to look at the context properties for the message (click on the image for a larger version):
Looking through the context properties (both promoted and non-promoted), there is no property for the originating application, or any ‘special’ properties that only the internals of BizTalk understands such as those seen in messages traversing request/response ports.
Given that applications are these ‘logical buckets’ and that they sit above the Message Box and the subscription engine, there is nothing stopping us therefore in subscribing to messages in ‘Application B’ that originated from ‘Application A’. This means we can quite easily perform cross-application subscription:
In a new application, create a send port that will subscribe to the ReceivePortName property as we did above and start it; drop a new messages in and you should now receive two output copies of the message, processed by different applications!
There is at least one drawback I can see here: Orchestrations in Application B still won’t be able to be bound to Receive Ports in Application A as the Admin Console won’t let you (without some brave database hacking…); it would however work if Orchestration receive ports were directly bound to the Message Box.
I can see that this approach could have beneficial uses across business-streams, or an ESB, where the on-ramp functionality lives in one application and end-point subscriptions live in other, separate applications.
Any other drawbacks or use-cases that I’m missing here?
* this isn’t necessarily true, as applications can reference other applications.
