1. Sign up for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Financials

• Next, enter your work account email

• Sign-in if you have already registered before.

• If you have the license, the sign-up process would indicate the same. In which case, click OK to proceed.

• Within minutes you will land on the Dynamics 365 for Financials home page showing the sample data for fictitious company "CRONUS US"

2. Setup the OData feeds

• Click the Search option on the top right of the browser

• Search for "assisted" in the search window

• Click on Assisted Setup
• From the options choose "Set up reporting". This launches the Reporting Data Setup wizard

• In the wizard, click Next

• Choose "Create a new data set". Click Next.

• Enter a data set name and click the ... to select the table for the feed.

• Choose "Sales Orders" table from the list and click OK

• Click Next
• In the next screen, select the columns to include in the OData feed. Once done, click Publish.

• [Optional] Note down the URL of the feed.

• You can repeat the wizard to add an OData feed for "Sales Line items" table. Once done, close Assisted Setup and return to the home page.

3. Configure your OData credentials

• Launch the search window once again

• This time, search for "Users"

• Click on the user name you would like to configure for use with the OData feed

• In the user configuration window, click on "Web Service Access". If this field is empty you need to choose "Change Web Service Key" to configure a new key. Once done, copy the key in some safe place - we will need this when we create a connection in PowerApps.

4. Use PowerApps to connect to Dynamics 365 for Financials

• Launch PowerApps Studio on Windows. The experience would be similar for PowerApps Studio running in the browser. Click on -> to view the list of all connections available for creating app from data

• Click on "New connection" and choose "Dynamics 365 for Financials"

• For the OData feed URL enter <your business>.financials.dynamics.com:7048/MS/OData as indicated in the sample below. The user credentials are the ones you created for the OData feed earlier. Use "CRONUS US" as the sample Company. Click Connect

• In the dataset screen, choose "default"

• Choose the sales order feed that we created earlier

• In a few minutes PowerApps will create a three-screen app. We will only need the Browse screen. From the "Content" menu choose Data sources. Click on Add data source > Dynamics 365 for Financials > Choose sales line items OData feed. You should have created this feed earlier.

• Copy the Sales Order Gallery and paste another Gallery below for the Sales Line items. Bind the new Gallery to the expression:

  Filter(saleslines, SalesOrderGallery.Selected.No=Document_No)

• This causes the second Gallery to take sales line items based on selection of Sales Orders in the first Gallery.

5. Video

Pre-requisites

Download the app from the Windows Store here: https://aka.ms/GetProjectSiena. You will also need the WADL Generator tool. The installations are fairly straight forward. I will talk about the concepts and flow more in my future posts, for now let’s dive right into the example.

Let’s split the app into adding the following:

• News ticker
• Weather data
• Clock
• Stock chart

Adding a news ticker

Let’s first create a ticker and then wire the ticker to a news feed.

Create a ticker

To create a ticker, add a label with some text. Adjust the Y position to near bottom of the screen. The X position of the label needs to be progressively increased/decreased at different points in time to give the marquee effect. To get the desired effect, tie the X location value to a timer as shown in the functions below.

PlayPause Timer	Comments
	Initialize with approx. length of a character and scroll speed
	How long to scroll before resetting the timer

Ticker label	Comments
	label moves from right to left as the timer value increases

Querying REST service

Replace the ticker text with content from a news service. In this example, I use the NYTimes developer API to update the ticker.

Note: you would first need to register for API key from https://developer.nytimes.com/.

To integrate with Project Siena, we need the WADL describing the REST API from NYTimes.  Instead of hand coding the WADL, I am going to use the WADL generator tool mentioned earlier. The following screen calls out the API and its parameters.

Now we can go to AppData-> Data Sources and add the WADL file.

Once added, the API is available for use in Project Siena functions. Change the ticker label text with the result of the API call:

Ticker label	Comments
	Get label text from NYTimes news

  For configuration purpose, I have added a NewsCategory combo-box to choose the news section.

NewsCategory	Comments
	NYTimes news sections. You can get more strings from the developer docs

  If things have been configured correctly, the news ticker should look similar to this:

Adding weather data

Similar to News, you can query popular weather APIs to retrieve city specific weather information. In this example, I use the OpenWeatherMap API for querying current and forecast weather data.

For API key, usage, pricing, Terms of Use and other guidelines, refer to https://openweathermap.org

Once again use the WADL Generator tool to add two functions querying OpenWeatherMap – one to get weather by city and another one to get the forecast for the next 4 days.

If you look at the json output, notice OpenWeatherMap output publishes a reference to the weather icon. We can tie this URL to the image control in Project Siena. I have added an option for users to select the city.

Function	Comment
	Combo box for city names
	Image control to show the current weather
	Label to show the current temperature for the city
	Weather Forecast for the next 4 days shown in a Horizontal Gallery view with text and images

After arranging the control and updating colors, the weather forecast should look similar to this:

Note: the JSON response for the weather forecast returns date time in UNIX UTC format. To convert it to days of week as shown above, a quick hack would be to define the time elapsed until some recent day and add it back to the date value and format it using Text function:

Function	Comment
	Quick hack to convert UNIX UTC to day of week

Adding clock and stock chart

It’s easy to add a quick stock chart as an image by querying another REST API and also add a simple clock using another timer “Timer2”.

Function	Comment
	Current Date
	Current Time
	Finance bar chart with fixed stock symbol. For options to configure refer to the link below.

Wrapping it up…

Adding the controls to Project Siena is the fun part of the whole process! The app on completion should look something similar to the one below.

 You can now publish the app and install to your Windows devices.

You can extend this simple app by add a Settings page to configure Celsius/Farenheit, stock symbol name, news source, locale etc.

If there are ways to improve this app or areas you would like to hear more, please leave your comments below!

References

• Project Siena tutorials/samples: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/projectsiena/default.aspx

• NYTimes developer API: https://developer.nytimes.com/  

• OpenWeatherMap API: https://openweathermap.org/api

• REST APIs for stock chart from Yahoo Finance: https://bit.ly/1Cm1o5S

-Karthik

About the book

• Chapter 1: Hello BizTalk Services – gives an overview of the cloud integration technology
• Chapter 2: Messages and Transforms – talks about transforms and its capabilities
• Chapter 3: Bridges – talks about Bridge as a key messaging artifact
• Chapter 4: Enterprise Application Integration – discusses EAI concepts and examples
• Chapter 5: Business-to-business Integration – discusses B2B concepts and examples
• Chapter 6: API – discusses programmatic access to BizTalk Services
• Chapter 7: Tracking and Troubleshooting – talks about the errors and tools to troubleshoot common problems
• Chapter 8: Moving to BizTalk Services – talks about migration from Server to Services

Sample Chapter and Ordering

• Amazon US
• Amazon UK
• Safari
• Barnes & Noble
• Packt

Forewords

From the technical side of things, there are two key EDI transactions which enable the exchange of information during enrolment and remittance by the user with a FFE or SBE. Below are both the flows:

Enrollment using EDI 834

In EDI 834, the ST03/GS08 segment remains 005010X220A1 after HIPAA Errata installation. The existing schema in BizTalk Server 2010 and later for HIPAA 834 can be used for HIX interactions.

For 834, the flow is as follow:

• Individual logs-in to the FFE website, compares plans and selects a plan (QHP)
• Individual or a broker on their behalf may also update member information, cancel, terminate or change an existing health plan
• For the above updates, FFE will send the 834 transaction with enrollment information to the QHP provider
• QHP Issuer responds back with a TA1 and 999 acknowledgements to confirm the transaction
• QHP Issuer also responds back with 834 Confirmation transaction
• With SBE, the SBE sends a copy of the 834 notification to the FFE

Remittance using EDI HIX 820

The current transaction used to communicate payment-related information, the HIPAA ASC X12 005010X218 (820), cannot provide the program-level payment information and does not meet the business requirements of the Affordable Care Act. As a result, the ASC X12 standards body has finalized the ASC X12 005010X306 (820), referred to as the "HIX 820" for use with remittance.

For 820, the flow is as follows:

• Individual initiates a payment towards a plan
• The exchange will send a 820 transaction with remittance information/premiums from the individual to the QHP provider
• QHP Issuer responds back with a TA1 and 999 acknowledgement to confirm the transaction

BizTalk Server 2013 ships the new HIX 820 schema in the CU2 update from https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2892599. For earlier versions including BizTalk Server 2009 and BizTalk Server 2010, the schemas can be obtained by contacting Microsoft Customer Support Services per https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2882453.

References

• https://www.healthcare.gov
• https://marketplace.cms.gov/index.html
• https://obamacarefacts.com

-Karthik Bharathy

You can also follow me on Twitter @kb_chirps for quicker updates or read my book on "Getting Started with BizTalk Services" (pre-order from here)

This is a two-part series on using TPM OM API in BizTalk Services. In Part 1, we discussed the TPM model and in Part 2, we will use the model in a sample walkthrough.

We saw the TPM model in the earlier post. Let’s now look at creating a Partner and querying the result using OM API. TPM OM OData source is hosted at https://<deploymentName>.biztalk.windows.net/default/$partnermanagement where <deploymentName> is the name of your BizTalk Services deployment. The metadata of the datasource represents the EDM data model for OData in XML. This can be obtained by adding the $metadata to the query.

For example, type the URL in the browser https://<deploymentName>.biztalk.windows.net/default/$partnermanagement/$metadata to see the TPM objects, navigation properties and associations as below.

Let’s connect to this OData source from C# to build a simple application. For the complete source code, please refer to the MSDN Code Gallery link below.

1. Install WCF Data Services 5.3.0 https://nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Data.Services/5.3.0 on your client machine

2. From Visual Studio, create an empty C# project. Right click on Service References in Solution Explorer and choose Add Service Reference…

3.       3. Type the $metadata URL in the Address field and hit Go. You will see the TpmContext in the Services. Rename the Namespace to TpmServiceReference

4.     4. Add the directive using <yournamespace>.TpmServiceReference;

 Now in order to query the service we need three things –

Query ACS to get the authorization token for the endpoint

Initialize the TpmContext with the OData source URL

Add an event handler that passes this token as part of the header for every GET/POST call

Add the logic to query the OData service
 

5      5. Get the ACS details of your deployment – Go the Windows Azure Management Portal, BizTalk Services node and click on Connection Information and note down the details.

           6. Query ACS for a token – use variables for ACS address, issuer name, issuer secret and the deployment address to which the token is queried for.

7.        7. Initialize the TpmContext with the base URL of the OData source (this will not contain the /$metadata). Also add the event handler to stamp the ACS token to the header

8.        8. Add an event handler

Note: x-ms-version is a mandatory header and indicates the version of the TPM OM API OData service. 1.2 here is the version for the BizTalk Services February update

 9.   You can now use CRUD operations. Here is a sample to create a Partner and Profile. Note the use of SetLink using navigation properties.

10.    10. You can also use Linq to query the data

Compile and run the application to create the partner and also see the list of existing partners. Note the MSDN Code Gallery sample contains code to add X12, EDIFACT and AS2 agreements as well. After creation of agreements from TPM OM API, the agreements are in Draft state. You need to go to the BizTalk Services portal to edit the agreement, add Transform and Route settings and then deployment the agreement.

References

• ·   MSDN Code Gallery OM API sample
• ·   OM API REST Reference
• ·   WCF Data Services

     
-Karthik Bharathy

You can also follow me on Twitter @kb_chirps for quicker updates on BizTalk or read my book on "Getting Started with BizTalk Services" (pre-order from here)

B2B customers define trading relationships between partners using technical agreements. BizTalk Services provides B2B capabilities to manage this relationship using the BizTalk Services portal or through API. Trading partner management API is used to manage the lifecycle of an agreement programmatically. The true power of the API is realized when one can dynamically change the behaviour of an agreement at runtime.

Think of a scenario where B2B partners need to comply with a new mandate, say by switching from “:” to “;”separator in X12 messages. Or consider the scenario when you are sending test messages to agreements in the stage environment and you would like to move the agreements to the production environment. In either scenario, BizTalk Services portal is useful if you there are less than 5 agreements to be updated. However if the change is across 100 or even 1000 agreements, it would be helpful to automate the updates.

Before we go further, let’s look at the object model in its basic form. From the diagram below, there are Partners who trade with each other, their businesses (profiles) which exchange data on a pre-negotiated agreement and data adheres to some protocol (settings) like EDIFACT or X12 depending on the region.

The TPM model is exposed for consumption through WCF Data Services, a .NET framework that enables the model to be accessed over Open Data Protocol (OData). Let’s also briefly look at how WCF Data Services are used. WCF Data Services are stateless but the state of the client is maintained in DataServiceContext. In our case, TpmContext inherits DataServiceContext. All CRUD operations to the OM will be carried out using the TpmContext object which exposes a set of object collections of the TPM OM. TpmContext also exposes two important methods setLink and AddLink for managing relationships between objects. The methods accept the source and destination object and the navigation property name between the objects. When the relationship between objects is 1-N, then use AddLink else when the relationship is N-1 or 1-1 use the SetLink method. For example, one Partnership can contain one specific Partner (use SetLink) while one Partner can be part of multiple Partnerships (use AddLink). Both are shown in the code snippet below:

var partnership = newPartnership();
context.AddToPartnerships(partnership);
partnership.PartnerA = partnerA;
context.SetLink(partnership, "PartnerA", partnerA); // navigation property PartnerA
partnerA.PartnershipsAsA.Add(partnership);
context.AddLink(partnerA, "PartnershipsAsA", partnership); // navigation property PartnershipAsA
partnership.PartnerB = partnerB;
context.SetLink(partnership, "PartnerB", partnerB); // navigation property PartnerB
partnerB.PartnershipsAsB.Add(partnership);
context.AddLink(partnerB, "PartnershipsAsB", partnership); // navigation property PartnershipAsB
context.SaveChanges();

Now once we know the complete model, we can tie the objects and their navigation properties and use it to update the model. let’s look at the complete model:

The objects in the model are explained in the table below:

Note all X12, EDIFACT, AS2 specific objects are shown in the table. The objects have to be created or updated, added to the TpmContext and the corresponding navigation property must also be updated using setLink or addLink in code for CRUD operations with OM API. Now that we have the background, in Part 2 let’s put things in action and write a sample application using the API.

-Karthik Bharathy

You can also follow me on Twitter @kb_chirps for quicker updates on BizTalk or read my book on "Getting Started with BizTalk Services" (pre-order from here)