Send Endpoints and Send Ports

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 send variation, referred to informally as a Commerce Server send adapter, that is naturally associated with the BizTalk Server concepts of endpoints and send ports. The BizTalk Server documentation defines endpoints and send ports as follows:

Endpoint. The logical representation of a location, typically expressed in URL form, providing a physical address for data received or sent.
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 Catalog send adapters to handle the importing of catalogs from two different trading partners, you would not talk about these as two different Catalog send adapters, but as two different Catalog send adapter endpoints. You configure the transport properties of these two Catalog send adapter endpoints separately, as part of the configuration of the two send ports with which they are each associated.

Send ports, in BizTalk Server, have a large number of properties associated with them, organized into a number of different tabs in the Send Port Properties dialog box. These tabs include tabs for specifying inbound maps, outbound maps, filters, tracking, and so on, most of which are not unique to send ports associated with Commerce Server send adapters. You should refer to the BizTalk Server documentation as the definitive source of information about how to configure the wide variety of send port properties that are not unique to the Commerce Server send adapters.

The relatively small subset of configuration properties that are unique to a particular Commerce Server send adapter are all found in a single subordinate dialog box of the Send Port 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 send 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 Orders 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 Profiles as the value of the Type field.

Note

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

Send Endpoints and Send Ports

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