ShareTalk Integration (SharePoint/BizTalk) – Part 5 Archiving Documents that have been retrieved from SharePoint

In Part 4 of this series we discussed retrieving documents from SharePoint. Much like the FILE Adapter in BizTalk, the WSS adapter will move this data instead of copying.  The fundamental issue with just copying the data is that the documents will continue to be copied with each poll that the adapter makes.  This may be ok for some scenarios but from my experience destination systems usually want the data once and only once.

The WSS adapter has an interesting feature when retrieving documents called “Archive Location URL”

I am going to build upon scenario that we used in Part 4 and create an “Archive” Document Library.

• Click on “Site Actions” - “Create”

• Click on “Document Library”

• I am going to call this document library “Outbound Archive”.  Remember this as you will need to populate the “Archive Location” property in the BizTalk receive location.

• If you click on the “View All Site Content” link, you will find that we now have an “Inbound Documents”, “Outbound Archive” and “Outbound Documents” that BizTalk can use when communicating with SharePoint.

• In my BizTalk Receive Location I now want to indicate that “Outbound Archive” is the “Archive Location URL”

• I now want to test this scenario so I am going to upload a document to my “Outbound Documents” Document library.

• The file was picked up and delivered to 2 locations:
  • The URI indicated in the Send Port that has a filter on the Receive Port that is polling SharePoint

• The document was also copied to the “Outbound Archive” folder with its original filename it tact.

 

As you can see the “Archive Location URL” is a powerful feature in the WSS Adapter.  I can envision a scenario where you build this great integrated scenario between SharePoint and BizTalk and have a last minute requirement indicating “that it would be really nice to have an archived copy of these messages that BizTalk is consuming”. Without this feature you could probably create a Send Port group and have BizTalk send a message back to SharePoint but this is a cleaner approach.

The next topic that I will be covering in this series will be integration with InfoPath. Stay tuned…