Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

13.5. No Suspended Messages/Orchestrations

Suspension of messages and orchestrations by BizTalk is rarely a desirable outcome within any BizTalk solution. A suspended message or orchestration could represent a significant amount of money to you or a customer (perhaps even risking an important order) and can present a performance problem if you have many congesting the MessageBox.

Depending on the type of suspension, it might not be resumable, meaning you have a dead orchestration or message that contains important information that still needs to be processed. At this stage, your only option is to save any referenced messages to disk and resubmit or manually process them, incurring often unacceptable administration overhead.

An alternate approach discussed previously is to manually repair the application. If you enable failed message routing on all receive or send ports and ensure that all exceptions are caught inside your orchestrations and subsequently pass the messages to manual repair, you can then almost entirely remove the potential for suspended messages and enable easy identification of failed messages through your custom repair application.

This repair application can then enable quick and easy resolution of any problems without having to train administration staff to understand BizTalk concepts such as orchestrations and messages, and the steps to resolve them. Instead, this enables other roles within your organization to perform the repair operation.