Managing Agreements

Article
02/02/2021

A Trading Partner Agreement (TPA) is defined as a definitive and binding agreement between two trading partners for transacting messages over a specific B2B Protocol. See Trading Partner Agreement.

This topics shows you how to create, view, edit, enable, disable, or delete an agreement.

Prerequisites

You must be logged on as a member of the BizTalk Server Administrators or BizTalk Server B2B Operators group.

Create an agreement

Open BizTalk Server Administration, expand the BizTalk group, and select Parties.
In the Parties and Business Profiles page, right-click a business profile that is part of the agreement you are creating, select New, and then select Agreement.

In the General Properties:

In the Agreement Parameters section, do the following:

Use this	To do this
Name	Enter a name for the agreement
ID	Lists unique identification for the agreement. This text box is read-only, and display the agreement ID after you select Apply for the first time, and the settings are accepted.
Status	Specifies the status of the agreement. By default, an agreement is created in an Active state. If you want the agreement to be disabled when it is first created, select Disabled from the drop-down list.
Protocol	Specifies the protocol for the agreement. - For an X12 encoding protocol, select X12 from the drop-down list. See Configuring X12-Specific Agreement Properties - For an EDIFACT encoding protocol, select EDIFACT from the drop-down list. See Configuring EDIFACT-Specific Agreement Properties. - For an AS2 encoding protocol, select AS2 from the drop-down list. See Configuring AS2 Agreement Properties. Note The agreement properties are provided in the one-way agreement tabs. The one-way agreement tabs appear after you have selected the second profile with which the agreement will be created. You select the second partner in the following steps.

In the First Partner section, do the following:

Use this	To do this
Name	Displays the partner name that has the business profile for which you are creating the agreement. This text box is read-only.
Profile	Displays the name of the profile for which you are creating the agreement. This text box is read-only.
Protocol Set	If you created an X12 protocol set as part of the business profile, you can select that from the drop-down list. If you did not create an X12 protocol set as part of the business profile, you can leave this empty.

In the Second Partner section, do the following:

Use this	To do this
Name	From the drop-down select a party that has the business profile with which you want to create an agreement.
Profile	From the drop-down select a profile with which you want to create an agreement.
Protocol Set	If you created an X12 protocol set as part of the business profile, you can select that from the drop-down list. If you did not create an X12 protocol set as part of the business profile, you can leave this empty.

Tip

Press CTRL, select the business profiles that will be part of the agreement, right-click either business profile, select New, and then select Agreement. The values for partner name and business profiles for both the partners are automatically populated in the Agreement Properties dialog box.

Note

As soon as you select the other profile, two tabs are added next to the General tab. Each tab represents a one-way agreement between the two parties. You use the tabs to enter the agreement properties.

Select the Enable Agreement check box to enable the agreement, and do the following:

Use this	To do this
From	Select the date and time from which the agreement is valid.
No End Date	Select this option if you do not want to set an end date when the agreement is disabled.
End By	Select this option to enter the date and time until the agreement is valid.

In the Common Host Settings section, do the following:

Use this	To do this
Log errors to event log	Select this option if you want to log any errors generated by the EDI engine (EDI pipelines, batching orchestration, routing orchestration, etc.), with contextual information, to the Windows Event Viewer. Note: Does not apply to AS2 agreements.
Log warnings to event log	Select this option if you want to log any warnings generated by the EDI engine (EDI pipelines, batching orchestration, routing orchestration, etc.), with contextual information, to the Windows Event Viewer. Note: Does not apply to AS2 agreements.
Turn ON reporting	Select this option to display status entries for all EDI messages (incoming and outgoing) on the EDI Interchange and Correlated ACK Status tab of the Group Overview page in the BizTalk Server Administration Console. If unchecked, no status entries are displayed.
Store message payload for reporting	If you selected Turn ON reporting, select this option to store transaction sets in the EDI tables of the tracking (BizTalkDTADb) database. Note: Does not apply to AS2 agreements.

In the General tab, on the Contact Information page, do the following:
1. In the Contact1 tab, enter the contact information for the party’s profile with which you are creating an agreement. This data is for information purposes only; it is not used by the BizTalk Runtime.
2. To add another tab for contact, select the New Contact tab.
3. To delete a contact tab, select Delete from the top right corner of the tab page.
  
  Note
  
  You cannot delete the Contact1 tab. You can only delete the new tabs that you add.
In the General tab, on the Additional Properties page, do the following:

Note

The information you enter on this page is not used by the BizTalk Server for any processing; this data is for information purposes only.
1. In the Additional Properties grid, enter name-value pairs for any information that you want to add related to the party or agreement. Enter a name-value pair to store any information about the party. You can add as many name-value pairs as you want.
  
  To delete a name-value pair, select the row, and select Delete from the top-right corner.
2. In the Text 1, Text 2, and Agreement text boxes, enter information about the agreement with a party.
3. Select Apply to accept the properties, or select OK to complete the configuration setting. Either action validates the settings.

View or change an agreement

In BizTalk Server Administration, select Parties.
In the Parties and Business Profiles page, select any of the two business profile that have the agreement that you want to view or edit.
In the Agreements section, right-click the agreement, and then select Properties.

In the Agreement Properties, view or edit the agreement. For the values that can be entered on the different tabs and pages in the Agreement Properties dialog box, see the following:

For this	See this
For X12 agreement	Configuring X12-Specific Agreement Properties
For EDIFACT agreement	Configuring EDIFACT-Specific Agreement Properties
For AS2 agreement	Configuring AS2 Agreement Properties

Select Apply to accept the properties, or select OK to complete the configuration setting. Either action validates the settings.

Enable or disable an agreement

In BizTalk Server Administration, select Parties.
In the Parties and Business Profiles page, select any of the two business profile that have the agreement that you want to edit.
In the Agreements section, right-click the agreement, and then select Enable or Disable.

Note

When an agreement is first created, it is always enabled by default. The Enable option is available only when the agreement is disabled. The Disable option is available only when the agreement is enabled.

Delete an agreement

In BizTalk Server Administration, select Parties.
In the Parties and Business Profiles page, select any of the two business profile that have the agreement that you want to delete.
In the Agreements section, right-click the agreement that you want to delete, and then select Delete.
In the Confirm delete agreement dialog box, select Yes to delete the agreement.