Comming soon: Tool to build your own queries for MBV

jpierauc — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:49:00 GMT

Hello,

I create this post just to announce that I will make available very soon a tool to build queries for MBV : MBVQueryBuilder.

Let me explain quickly role of this tool as I will make a more detailed post on that later :

As you noticed, I added already a lot queries embeded in MBV exe but because more and more MBV users, inside or outside Microsoft, suggest me to add some queries in MBV, I decided for a while to change MBV Architecture to be easily extensible in term of queries to add (MBV version 10.12 allow you to add also your own rules).

So it means that MBV accept "custom" queries to be added in its lists of queries via an XML file.

To achieve that, you will just have to use MBVQueryBuilder tool to create your custom queries with also their rules (warnings they can generate) in a queries repository XML file.
To create a query, you will have to provide some information like its Type (SQL, WMI, BAT, CMD, VBS), Caption, Comment, Target Type (MsgBox db, Mgmt db, ALL BT servers, ALL Biztalk SQL Servers,etc...) , and of course its body (ex: "Select @@ServerName" for a SQL query, or "Select * from MSBTS_SendPort" for a BizTalk WMI one)

MBV contain a query execution engine for queries of type SQL, WMI, CMD, .BAT, or VBS so it will automatically execute your queries knowing just its type and body.

Once you built your repository of queries, you can select in the same tool the specific queries you want to be visible in MBV and save them in an MBVEXT.XML file.

This file must be put in the same folder than MBV, and when MBV will be started you will see your custom queries in an additional listview in MBV Gui interface, that's all !
you can then select/unselect your queries like for any embeded queries an start a Collect process. and output of your queries will be also visible in the resulting HTML report

To see a concrete sample of this MBV query extensibility, you can have a look on following Thiago's Post (Thanks Thiago to have shared that) :

http://connectedthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/extending-msgboxviewer-with-biztalk-message-body-tracking-count-queries/

So stay tuned for availability of this tool !

My Biztalk Tools blog : MBVQueryBuilder extensibility

Comming soon: Tool to build your own queries for MBV