BizTalk Server BAM – Limitation of Tracking Profile Editor (TPE)

BizTalk artifacts only!

The most important limitation of TPE is that it can only be used to capture data from BizTalk artifacts. If you want to use Bam to capture data from custom code, you will need to use the BAM API.

Messages and elements limitations

Some messages and elements can’t be tracked with TPE. You can only track messages that have a schema that is known at design time, so you can’t track messages of type string or System.XML.XMLDocument.

Also, you can’t capture data from repeating fields.

Some limitations exist on the length of data item names. The combined length of a folder name and data item instance value cannot be longer than 128 characters.

Orchestration shapes limitations

You also can’t track any of the following orchestration shapes:

• Group (Task)
• Loop (While)
• Message Assignment
• Suspend
• Terminate
• Throw Exception
• Transform

You can work around these limitations for some shapes by wrapping them in a nontransactional scope shape and tracking the scope. However, this doesn’t work for the Suspend and Terminate shapes, as they never fire the Shape End event.

Author: Sandro Pereira

Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community. View all posts by Sandro Pereira