In one of our previous posts – Azure Files: A Step-by-Step Guide to Manual Drive Mounting on a Virtual Machine – we explained how to map a network drive in a virtual machine to connect with an Azure File Share. Well, today, we’re diving into a quick proof of concept (POC) to see how BizTalkServer handles writing or reading onto that mounted drive or, better, how it is able to communicate with the Azure File Share.
Consider a scenario where a BizTalk Server application receives files and undergoes processing (potentially an orchestration), then saves them to a designated location that we want to be an Azure File Share.
For example, in our previous blog, we told how to mount a drive for an Azure File Share on your local virtual machine. Does that mean that BizTalk Server can use it like this?
As you can see here, giving the drive’s path as the destination folder will give you the direct path to it.
But unfortunately, employing BizTalk to write to this location poses a challenge. Messages become “dehydrated,” essentially remaining idle as if no subscribers are available to consume them.
That means the BizTalk Server wouldn’t work with the mount drive because Mapped network drive letters cannot be used in the file path, as they are user session-based.
With that saying, how can we turn this around? Actually, it is quite simple.
On your Azure Portal, access your File Share overview page to obtain the File Share URI. Subsequently:
- Modify the URI to emulate a standard drive path. (If in doubt, check the related post) from this:
- https://statrainingpoc.file.core.windows.net/fileshare-test
- To this:
- \\statrainingpoc.file.core.windows.net\fileshare-test\
- Proceed with configuring the Send Port, incorporating the adjusted URI as the Destination Folder:
- Next, navigate to the Authentication section.
- Here, set your username, which should begin with Azure\name-of-your-storage_account. For example:
- Azure\statrainingpoc.
- Here, set your username, which should begin with Azure\name-of-your-storage_account. For example:
- Next, retrieve the password from your storage account. To do this:
- Navigate to your Azure Portal, locate your Storage Account, and click on Access Keys.”
- Then, click on Show to reveal the access key and copy it into the password field.
Following authentication setup, confirm the connection’s integrity, enabling BizTalk to seamlessly compose messages directly onto the file share drive.
To see this working, you can now access the mounted drive on the virtual machine, and there, you can observe the messages being successfully written.
Finally, you’ll notice that the File Share contains the same content as what we’ve written on the virtual machine and vice versa.
By following these steps, you can effectively configure BizTalk to write messages onto a mounted drive within a virtual machine. This seamless integration ensures bidirectional data exchange between the virtual environment and the Azure File Share, facilitating efficient data management and workflow automation.
I hope you have enjoyed this POC, and we will see you at the next one. If you enjoyed the content or found it useful and wish to support our efforts to create more, you can contribute towards purchasing a Star Wars Lego for Sandro’s son!
