Chapter 8. Document Tracking
by Stephen Tranchida
In This Chapter
Building an industrial strength distributed system can be a daunting task. The challenge is even greater when the system involves communication between organizations with different data models and different platforms. BizTalk Server enables you to build these types of systems using a loosely coupled architecture based on document interchanges.
The tasks of monitoring, analyzing, and debugging a system of document interchanges poses a unique set of challenges. The system must provide a means of tracking information as it moves from a source to a destination. The system should also keep a record of the transactions that get processed. These relatively simple features can be surprisingly difficult and expensive to build when dealing with a multitier distributed system. Fortunately, the architects of BizTalk Server recognized the importance of these features and provided a powerful and easy-to-use solution in the form of BizTalk Document Tracking.
This chapter covers the BizTalk Document Tracking system in depth. After explaining what you can do with document tracking, we'll take a high-level tour of the entire BizTalk Document Tracking System. Next, we anticipate that many readers have real-world application integration scenarios on the horizon that would benefit from BizTalk Document Tracking. With this in mind, we will explain how to properly plan for the use of BizTalk Document Tracking in the early stages of a development cycle. As you will see, there are some important scalability issues to consider when planning to use the document tracking system. Following the planning phase comes “the good stuff.” We will cover how to configure and administer BizTalk Document Tracking through the various tools that expose tracking settings. After you know how to configure BizTalk Document Tracking, you will learn how to query and view tracking data using the tracking viewer provided with BizTalk Server. In case your system has some specialized tracking requirements, we will also cover how to build customized tracking solutions.