Using BAM API’s in a BizTalk Solution

Recently, I had a requirement where I needed to track a subset of messages flowing through an ESB to capture and store key data points to a table along with the raw Xml of the message. The data was going to be used by the client for viewing and reporting.

After a couple of small POC’s, it was decided to leverage BAM API’s in order to persist the data. BAM comes with OOB functionality to capture and display data elements through the BAM portal. Additionally, after defining an Observation Model using the Excel plug-in, the BAM definition is then deployed which creates Sql Server tables, stored procedures and views in order to persist and update the tables.

But, OOB functionality does not support capturing and persisting of the underlying Xml or provide content based filtering, so as part of the POC, the BAM API’s were used to store the Xml.

A C# component was written to use the OrchestrationEventStream class from the BAM API. This class is designed to asynchronously write data into the BAMPrimaryImport database as well as provide transactional consistency when used from either an orchestration or pipeline.

For this particular solution that I was working on, the messages that needed to be tracked were already being consumed by a generic Data Archive orchestration. This orchestration was then modified to contain a Decision Shape that would filter based on configurable conditions to capture the required content.