This is a “back to the basics” post with a list of reasons BizTalk might not be processing (consuming) your file that you have placed (dropped) in a directory associated with a Receive Location.
1. Are the Host Instances started? (Specifically the Host Instance associated with the Receive Location). Be sure and refresh (F5 or right-click refresh) to make sure you are not looking at old statuses.
Each receive location has a “Receive Handler”. See Figure 1 below.
See Figure 2 below to check if the Host Instances are started. Be sure and refresh (F5 or right-click refresh) to make sure you are not looking at old statuses.
In the case above, the Receive Location Hander is BizTalkServeApplication. So it doesn’t matter that the Rosetta Host Instance is not started.
2. Make sure the Receive Location itself is “Enabled”. The figure below doesn’t show, but I opened BizTalk Admin console, navigated to the Application on the left menu, then expanded the “Receive Locations”
3. Check Windows Application Event Viewer for Errors:
For example, here is an error I had today:
The FILE receive adapter cannot process file e:\Messages\Charter\Inbox\StarterParams\StartParams_Prod.xml because of one of the following reasons:
1) The file is read-only.
2) The file is a system file.
3) The FILE receive adapter does not have write permissions on the file.
To see if the file is read only, right click on the file and make sure the checkbox next to “read-only” attribute is NOT checked. Also make sure the file you are copying/dropping into the pickup directory is not “read-only”, because that attribute sticks when you copy it. NOTE: You might have a sample file in your Visual Studio Project, then when you check that project in to TFS (or some other source control system), the read-only attribute of that file is turned on. You might want to have a copy of your file for testing that is not part of TFS check-in so that the read-only attribute will stay off.
To check security, from Windows Explorer, right click the directory (not the file), click on the Security tab, and make sure that the userid that runs the Receive Handler Host Instance (see Figures 1 and 2 above) have Full Control. If in doubt, you could always add the user “Everyone” and give it full access. Then once you get it working, go back and tighten-up the security. If you are working on your own laptop or development computer, the security probably doesn’t matter. But on a shared development, QA, or production environment, security can be very important.
4. Consider checking the CPU performance on the machine.
I’ve seen cases where there is a task using 100% of the CPU, and that is preventing the BizTalk host instance to do its work.
The short cut to open Windows Task Manager is Cntl-Shift-Escape. I like to check the “Performance tab” to see what CPU Usage is, if it is high, and how long it has been high. If it is really high, like 90-100%, you can click Processes (then sort by CPU) and find out which task is taking all the CPU.
