Exporting and importing EDI Parties in BizTalk has a few challenges.  How do you migrate just one or two parties and agreements?  As BizTalk developers, we typically have to move bindings around 2 to 4 times, such as developer machine to DEV or TEST environment, then to UAT (User Acceptance Testing) or QA (Quality Assurnace) environment, and then ultimate to the production environment.

This MSDN post in the BizTalk Forum the question was asked how to export a single party from the Trading Party Management (TPM) system.  Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to create a helper solution, but I don’t have time for that right now.

I have tested this following.

1. As a proof of concept, I wanted to see if exporting parties from two different apps gives me the same parties in xml format.

a. From BizTalk Admin Console, pick an application and do right-click and select “Export” then “Bindings”.  Click the checkbox in the lower left

b. Now do the same thing for a different application, even one that doesn’t use EDI at all.

c. Edit the two binding files that were created.  The goal is to eliminate everything except the parties. So delete delete from <ModuleRefCollection> to line before <PartyCollection> (which is probably </ReceivePortCollection>, then save each file.  Now use you favorite file compare utility, such as WinCompare, BeyondCompare, or Total Commander’s built-in file compare, and you will see the PartyCollection sections are identical.

2. Before testing the migration of your EDI Parties from one system to another, you want to be sure you backup the parties on the target system.  This is done the same manner as above; there doesn’t seem to be a way to export only parties, you have to pick one app, then export it with “Export Global Party information” checked.  If you have to restore, you will have to delete parties and agreements in BizTalk Admin console, then re-import the binding file. (Just importing the binding file would not delete anything new that you would have added.)