Professional Biztalk Functoid Interview Preparation Guide

Download PDF

When a message is received, or else when a timeout has expired, the orchestration engine can be automatically triggered to rehydrate the instance – it is at this point that the orchestration engine loads the saved instance of the orchestration into memory, restores the state, and runs its from the point it left off.

Biztalk provides you with a really smart routing feature that allows the engine to decide where to send which message. For example, If you receive a message with the EmployeePaySlip schema, and it has the approved flag to true, it should be redirected to the Finance system Orchestration for making the payments and to the HR system Orchestration for keeping the records. This built in intelligence for the Biztalk engine allows it to route the messages simply based on some content within the messages.

Custom code or custom scripts can be added .

Below scenarios can tempt developer to create custom functoid:
☛ When there is no out of box functoids which can be used to complete the logic.
☛ When the number of functoids used to implement the logic goes on increasing and becomes difficult to follow and manage.

Custom functiods can be integrated into a solution using two ways (in both BizTalk.BaseFunctoid is derived):
☛ Directly by using inline code
☛ Indirectly by reference to a method in a class library deployed into the global assembly cache.

Structure

There are 9 categories available in Toolbox viz.,
☛ Advanced
☛ Conversion
☛ Cumulative
☛ Database
☛ Date and Time
☛ Logical
☛ Mathematical
☛ Scientific
☛ String

☛ 1. Difference between File and FTP Adapters.
☛ 2. Difference between SQL Receive and Send Adapters.
☛ 3. What is an updategram ? What is a Before and After Block in Updategram ?
☛ 4. How do you consume a WCF Service ?
☛ 5. How do you expose your artifacts as a service ?
☛ 6. What is the difference between exposing an Orchestration and Schema as a Service ?
☛ 7. Consider the Scenario – Everyday, you receive Updates for your BizTalk Hosted Application. You need 30min to perform the Updates. How do you handle this without having any downtime ?
☛ 8. What are the different modes of copying in Send File Adapter ?
☛ 9. What are the two methods in which File Adapter runs ?
☛ 10. What is the Advantage of Using Temporary Location for File Adapters ?
☛ 11. What are the various macros available for a File Adapter ?
☛ 12. How do you rename the Output File of a File Adapter ?

☛ 1. What is an Orchestration ?
☛ 2. Read about each and every shape used in Orchestration. Specifically – Parallel, Listen, Compensate
☛ 3. Transactions in Orchestration.
☛ 4. Difference between Atomic and Long Running Transactions.
☛ 5. How to handle Delivery Failures ?
☛ 6. How do you ensure FIFO ?
☛ 7. Different Orchestration Patterns.
☛ 8. What is an Orchestration Instance.
☛ 9. How can you build a Singleton Pattern in Orchestration.
☛ 10. Convoys.
☛ 11. Race Condition and Zombie /Orphaned messages.
☛ 12. How can you deploy 2 Orchestration side by side ?
☛ 13. How do you update a deployed Orchestration with 0 or Less downtime.
☛ 14. How do you debug an Orchestration ?
☛ 15. How do you trace the messages processed by an Orchestration ?
☛ 16. Difference between call and start Orchestrations
☛ 17. Direct Binding ?
☛ 18. What are dynamic ports. How will you dynamically set the port.
☛ 19. Can we have dynamic send and receive ports ?
☛ 20. How do you consume a web/wcf service in an Orchestration ?
☛ 21. What are Persistence points ?
☛ 22. How do you count the Number of Persistence Points ?
☛ 23. What is Correlation ?
☛ 24. What are subscriptions ?
☛ 25. Which shapes will yield persistence points ?
☛ 26. How do you enable FIFO ?
☛ 27. What is a Multipart Message ? How do you use that ?
☛ 28. What is the use of Compensate shape ?
☛ 29. Assume you are using Transactions in your Orchestration. How do you set Timeout incase if you dont receive a response from an external system ?
☛ 30. What is XPath ? How can you use that ?
☛ 31. Difference between using XPath and using Distinguished fields.
☛ 32. Can you control the number of instances created for an Orchestration ?
☛ 33. How do you execute a Pipeline from an Orchestration ?
☛ 34. What happens when to try to use the Promoted Propery whose value (missing element/node) is not present in the message ? (Missing Property Exception)
☛ 35. How do you test the existence of a Promoted Property before using it ?
☛ 36. How do you ensure that a message is delivered to the destination ?
☛ 37. How do you call a non-serialazable class from an Orchestration ?
☛ 38. Advantage of having an Atomic scope.

☛ 1. How do you deploy your application to Test Server ?
☛ 2. How do you deploy your application to Production Server ?
☛ 3. What are deployment scripts ?
☛ 4. What is a Binding File ?

☛ 1. Explain the Architecture of BizTalk Server.
☛ 2. What is a Messaging Agent ?
☛ 3. BizTalk Server is Very Costly. Why do you go for it.
☛ 4. Advantages of using BizTalk Server.
☛ 5. Why BRE ? What are the Advantages over Other Tools as it is very costly for Clients?
☛ 6. What is a Host?
☛ 7. What is a Host Instance ?
☛ 8. How do you run a Host Instance in a different Server ?
☛ 9. Difference between Inprocess and Isolated Host ? Why is Isolated Host required ?
☛ 10. How do you set the Host as Send/Receive Handlers ?

☛ 1. What are the different Types of Schemas ?
☛ 2. What is an Envelope Schema ?
☛ 3. What is a property schema ?
☛ 4. How property Schema differs from Others ?
☛ 5. How do you validate the incoming message against a particular Schemas ?
☛ 6. What are the ways to reuse Schemas ?
☛ 7. What is the difference between Importing and Including a Schema ?
☛ 8. What is a Canonical Schema ?
☛ 9. What is a Context Property ?
☛ 10. Are all Context Properties promoted ?
☛ 11. What happens if promoted property is not filled ? Will an exception be thrown.
☛ 12. What is the difference between Message Context Property Base and Message Data Property Base in Property Schema ?
☛ 13. How can you deploy 2 schemas side by side ?
☛ 14. Difference between Value Mapping and Value Mapping Flattening Functiods.
☛ 15. What is Auto Mapping Feature ?
☛ 16. Database Functoids.
☛ 17. Table Looping Functoids.
☛ 18. Cross Reference Functoids.
☛ 19. Difference between Value and ID Cross Reference Functoids ?
☛ 20. What is Part Context Property Base ?
☛ 21. Are Message Context Property Base Elements Promoted ? (No)
☛ 22. Can we have multiple versions of Schema within a pipeline ?
☛ 23. Difference between Index and Iteration Functoid ?
☛ 24. How do you call an external assembly from Map ?

☛ 1. Different Stages in Receive and Send Pipelines.
☛ 2. How to develop a Custom Pipeline Component ?
☛ 3. What are the various interfaces implemented for General, Disassemble/Assemble components ?
☛ 4. How do you promote a property in pipelines ?
☛ 5. How do you debug a Pipeline ?
☛ 6. How do you validate an XML in a pipeline ?

☛ 1. What are activities ?
☛ 2. What are Views ?
☛ 3. How to capture data for your activities ?
☛ 4. What is TPE ?
☛ 5. What are the different types of event streams ?
☛ 6. What do you enable continuation ?
☛ 7. How do you ensure Transactional Integrity with Event Streams ?
☛ 8. Difference between Message and Orchestration Event Streams ?
☛ 9. What are the different sources of Data (event sources) inside TPE ?
☛ 10. How do you set permissions to a view ?

When an orchestration has been idle for a while, the orchestration engine will save the state information of the instance and free up memory resources.

Record Count Functoid can be used here, the input to this is the looping record/element.

Yes, it is possible. To do so the method at first place should be declared as public and then it can be called from other scripting functoid.

An Orchestration can have more than one instance running simultaneously. Even though each of those multiple instances perform the same action, it does it on different data contained within a message.
Correlation is a process of associating an incoming message with the appropriate instance of an orchestration.
For Example: If your orchestration issues a purchase order, receives an invoice, and sends a payment, the developer must make certain that the invoice message is received by the orchestration instance which corresponds to the orchestration that sent the Purchase Order. Without correlation, it would be possible to send out an invoice for thousands of items even though the purchase order is for one. And each correlation is based on a set of properties known as correlation types.

You must manually grant permissions to BizTalk administrators group to access the Analysis Services Tracking database; by default, only OLAP administrators have permissions to it.

Property schema consists of the elements of the document schema which has been promoted

To build if-then-else it will need any of the Logical functoid (depending upon the requirements, e.g., if the value is to be matched then Equal Functoid) and a Value mapping functoid. The combination (Logical Functoid and Value Mapping Functoid) will repeat, firstly to implement IF condition and secondly to implement ELSE condition.

Yes with the use of Iteration functoid. Iteration functoid gives the index of the current record in a looping structure.

This DLL implements all the base classes which are needed to create a functoid.

The term functoids refers to predefined functions within the BizTalk Mapper tool set. Functoids support a number of useful translations and transformations.
We can consider functoids, as pre-defined functions that we can use to perform complex data manipulations and transformations. Typically on a map, the data is copied from source to destination by dragging links between elements of the two schemes. Functoids stays in the middle of these operations and apply an operation on the incoming data in order to transform them to the requirements of the destination. BizTalk Mapper Designer represents a functoid as a box in the middle of the link or links between the processing elements. As a point of interest, functoid is a term coined by Microsoft and is commonly described as “functions on steroids.”

The orchestration engine saves the state of a running orchestration instance at various points. If it needs to rehydrate the orchestration instance, start up from a controlled shutdown, or recover from an unexpected shutdown, it will run the orchestration instance from the last persistence point, as though nothing else had occurred