BizTalk NoS Ultimate: Features Overview (Part II)

In the last blog post, we analysed two of the basic features of BizTalk NoS Ultimate, a BizTalk developer tool – Expand solution and Wild Card Search. Today, we will continue to analyze the list of available features present in this Visual Studio extension, focusing on the report capabilities of BizTalk NoS Ultimate.

Reflector

This feature will create a report with a lot of useful information about your entire solution or for a particular project for analysis. It will provide some statistics and metrics, for example:

• • Solution metrics – number of projects, artifacts, orchestrations, transformation, schemas, and pipelines
  • Artifact metrics – Information about the  average Kilo bytes used by the artifact in memory or some metrics to understand the complexity of the artifact (orchestration, map and so on)

But, also information about:

• • • Which artifact is using this artifact or what is this artifact doing (very useful with orchestrations)
    • Show all the information like:
      • Artifact dependencies
      • Which port(s) is/are using this orchestration or schema or map?
      • How many shapes exist in the orchestration or how many Transactions (Atomic, Long-Running) exist, Compensation, or Error handling?
      • How many Construct messages or even how many transformations?
      • How many Functoids or links exist inside a transformation?
    • And so on

This is basically an interactive report or documentation of your solution. Interactive, because you can interact with the report and it will automatically open the artifact while you are reading it. You can open the directory, maps, orchestrations, schemas, and so on directly from the report.

The reflector can be used at all levels of your solution, from a simple artifact, a single project or just to produce a full report of your entire solution. The last means that you will have a report of all of the artifacts in the solution).

This also can be used to produce good documentation of your BizTalk Projects.

You can access this feature by:

• Right-click on your solution/project or artifact name, expand BizTalk NoS and select the Reflector option

Refactor

Similar to the Reflector feature, however, the Refactory will create a more simple report with a circular reference (internal and external) with other artifacts that can be very useful to understand the refactory strategy to use.

Another difference is that this report can only be made at the artifact level (orchestrations, pipelines, maps, and schemas). It isn’t available at the solution or project level.

You can accomplish this by access this feature by:

• Right-click on your artifact (Orchestration, map, schema…), expand the BizTalk NoS Reporting and select the Refactor option

This feature will provide some statistics and information about:

• Which artifact(s) is/are using this artifact
• Which artifact(s) is/are consumed by this resource
• Some general information like complexity, persistence points and error handling (in orchestrations), and so on.

I hope you are enjoying these features and stay tuned because this extension has more! Feel free to try this amazing extension for BizTalk Server here: Download BizTalk NoS Ultimate for BizTalk Server 2020.