Processing Empty Files in BizTalk 2010

Question

I have a receive location in my BizTalk 2010 project, and sometimes that receive location will receive an empty file. The receive pipeline is PassThruReceive. We then have a Send Port that has a filter for that Receive Port Name. So all we are doing is moving the file from the receive location to the send location.

The issue that I'm running into is that in the event that we get an empty file in the receive location, my client wants the file to still be moved to the send port. I know that out of the box, the FILE adapter discards empty files and writes an event to the Event Log stating that it was deleted.

I have followed articles that show a custom FILE adapter accomplishing this task. I have had some success with this custom adapter. The file is picked up. Received by BizTalk and the Send Port successfully sends the file. However, even with this solution, I'm running into an issue in the receive side where the file is locked and cannot be deleted. I have followed various articles on this subject, and I get the same issue every time where the file is locked and can not be deleted.

My question is. Even though batchMessage.Message.BodyPart.Data.Close(); is being called, the stream is still locked. Is there any way for me to find where else BizTalk may be locking the file? Is there any other way of handling this?

One of the articles that I followed is located here: http://biztalkwithshashikant.blogspot.com/2011/04/processing-empty-files-in-biztalk.html

Answer 1

It seems to me that you are running into issues when running your custom FILE adapter multi-server. I bet you are running more than 1 server in the BizTalk Group?

I haven't done this myself, but I heard that getting an adapter to run smoothly multi-server is one of the hardest things to do in BizTalk. The trick is to find a way to be able to share the load between multiple instances of the same BizTalk host.

Do you still have the same problem when running the instance only on 1 server instead of 2?

Answer 2

A way around this is to use the FTP adapter instead to pick up the files, the FTP adapter does not discard empty files.

It is quite possible that to system creating the files, it is still a file location, but also accessible via FTP.

Answer 3

in the custom pipeline component code method:

IBaseMessage Execute(IPipelineContext pContext, IBaseMessage pInMsg)

You should return pInMsg, not set to null, and the .BodyPart stream positioned at the end. If pInMsg is null BizTalk will discard the message silently. You don't need to close it but you do need to move it to the end to let BizTalk know you read and processed it all.