Wednesday, June 13, 2012

enableBizTalkCompatibilityMode in SAP adapter bindings

I've installed the BizTalk SAP adapter (more specifically, the WCF LOB Adapter SDK) to my development box and have successfully connected to our test SAP environment.

Within Visual Studio, I created a new BizTalk solution, used the Consume Adapter Service, and selected the sapBinding option. I went through the process of configuring the connection string, credentials, contract type, and, in this case, which IDoc was needed to create the schemas and binding information.

It all works wonderfully well. Two things, however, make me scratch my head a little bit.

First, the binding xml file (you could import this at the application level within the Administration Console) which is created by the wizard assumes you will be using the WCF-Custom transport type instead of WCF-SAP. This isn't really that big of a deal, more of a curiosity, since the configurations are essentially the same, just displayed a bit differently.

Second, the binding file has the binding configuration/property enableBizTalkCompatibilityMode set to false. When I mouse-over this property when selecting the WCF-SAP transport, I get this:



Set to True when used within BizTalk. Set to False otherwise.


So why doesn't the wizard set this to True in the first place?

To be honest, I'm not sure what this property does, as the documentation for it is a bit light.

I'll keep you posted as I come across new findings.