Storing or looking up ISA numbers with BizTalk EDI

Question

My company uses BizTalk for our EDI and AS2 communications. One periodic issue is that a VAN or similar partner we transmit with will want to know whether we received a file by it's ISA #. We currently do use the ISA # for routing within our ports, but I can't seem to find anywhere that this information is stored in BizTalk. Is there a way to look up an EDI message that BizTalk recieved by ISA#? Or perhaps someway I could get a hold of it and store it on my own?

Answer 1

If you're not explicitly using Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) to track this, you may be able to use message tracking.

If you have:

1. message tracking turned on for the message properties at a point in processing the messages when the ISA number is used, and
2. if the ISA number is promoted in a published schema (which I'm guessing it is, if you're using the out-of-the-box EDI stuff)

...then you could use the admin console to look for tracked messages with that schema and based on the particular field in the schema (e.g., EDI.ISA08 or EDI.ISA06). Of course, if you are mapping the ISA# to a particular party through your BizTalk configuration, then you would just need to search for Tracked Message Events where the Party Name equals the name you configured for that ISA#.

There is also built-in EDI tracking (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb226464(v=bts.10).aspx), with its own reports, but I'm not familiar with it enough to say whether or not it'll give you exactly what you need.

Otherwise, you will want to look at setting up BAM to save the ISA info that you need.

Answer 2

These fields are available inside the Biztalk message if you do EDI receive. msgIn(EDI.ISASegment) contains all ISA segments. Then you can do substring on control numbers and then put it in your outgoing filename:

ctrlnum (variable) = msgIn(EDI.ISA13) newfilename = FILE.ReceivedFileName + ctrlnum ;

This way each control number will show up in your filename and you don't even need to open the file or check tracked messages.