Document your BizTalk Installation
I recently downloaded the UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter and ran it on my local BizTalk installation. The output CHM is amazing and captures quite a bit of information.
The good part is that it is able to provide details like maps, schemas, variables, messages, ports etc within an orchestration. This helps when you have multiple orchestrations within a single application, since the BizTalk Admin console groups only at application level and not at individual orchestration level inside it.
A few minor issues however were
- It didn't document all the policies. I ran it a couple of times and it picked only 1 policy. It did list all the vocabularies though.
- Path for output file set in Output options screen isn't saved and restarting the exe resets this back to the default.
- It worked well with local BizTalk installation. For remote machines I got "object reference not set to an instance of an object" error. This could be due to the fact that the tool tries to loads the assemblies listed in the bts_assembly table in the BizTalkMgmtDb. It will not document in detail if it fails to load these (via GAC).
Overall, this is a great tool to have handy
Comments
Do you have a resolution for #3? I would like to document an installed system without having to configure it locally.
Posted by: Alex Brown | April 18, 2007 05:45 PM
Unfortunately no. You may have to check with the tool's author for that. However can you not configure this tool on your installed system itself?
Posted by: Atul Gupta | April 19, 2007 03:54 AM
You need to run the program locally on the server, or if remotely you need to be in the domain group with the right privilege to run the app and access the BizTalk databases. Works best running it on the server.
Posted by: Paul Somers | July 17, 2007 01:50 PM
The download link is no longer valid. Is the tool available somewhere else?
Posted by: Sean Sullivan | September 4, 2007 07:49 PM
@Sean, gotdotnet site has been phased out and moved to CodePlex. You can get the tool at http://www.codeplex.com/BizTalkDocumenter
Posted by: Atul Gupta | September 6, 2007 09:52 AM