Receive Endpoints, Receive Ports, and Receive Locations

Article
11/12/2009

For the latest version of Commerce Server 2007 Help, see the Microsoft Web site.

Each of the four BizTalk adapters that are provided with Commerce Server include a receive variation, referred to informally as a Commerce Server receive adapter, that is naturally associated with the BizTalk Server concepts of endpoints, receive ports, and receive locations. The BizTalk Server documentation defines endpoints, receive ports, and receive locations as follows:

Endpoint. The logical representation of a location, typically expressed in URL form, providing a physical address for data received or sent.
Receive port. A logical grouping of similar receive locations.
Receive location. The physical, design-time notion of a location (such as a URL) and an adapter type. A receive location in the Host node in the BizTalk Server Administration console, defines the receive functionality.
Send port. The location to which messages are sent or from which messages are received, and the technology that is used to implement the communication action. The location is uniquely identified by the name of the port.

Another way to think about an endpoint, in terms of a particular adapter, is that it is an individually configurable instance of that adapter. Therefore, if you configure two Orders receive adapters to handle the exporting of orders to two different warehouse applications for their fulfillment, you would not talk about these as two different Orders receive adapters, but as two different Orders receive adapter endpoints. You configure the transport properties of these two Orders receive adapter endpoints separately, as part of the configuration of the two receive locations with which they are each associated.

Receive ports and receive locations, in BizTalk Server, have a number of properties associated with them, organized into different tabs in the Receive Port Properties and Receive Location Properties dialog boxes. The former dialog box includes tabs for configuring properties with values that are shared by all of the receive locations grouped in that receive port. The latter dialog box includes tabs for configuring properties that are unique to that receive location. In both cases, most of the configuration properties that you can set are not unique to receive ports and receive location associated with Commerce Server receive adapters. You should refer to the BizTalk Server documentation as the definitive source of information about how to configure the receive port and receive location properties that are not unique to the Commerce Server receive adapters.

The relatively small subset of configuration properties that are unique to a particular Commerce Server receive adapter are all found in a single subordinate dialog box of the Receive Location Properties dialog box, known as the Transport Properties dialog box. You access this subordinate dialog box by clicking Configure within the Transport section of the General tab of the Send Port Properties dialog box.

Depending on which Commerce Server receive adapter you choose on the corresponding Type drop-down list, the configuration properties displayed in the Transport Properties dialog box will be different. For example, if you choose Commerce Server Catalog as the value of the Type field, the corresponding Transport Properties dialog box will present a different set of configuration options than if you choose Commerce Server Orders as the value of the Type field.

Note

Some of the properties will be the same for all of the Commerce Server receive adapters, but some of them will be different for each of the four Commerce Server receive adapters.

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Receive Endpoints, Receive Ports, and Receive Locations

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