• Fabian Wetzel
• 2017-04-10
  
• 2 min. read

Problem

The solution deployed using the BizTalk deployment framework and is ready to start but several send ports can not be enlisted. Trying to enlist them only yields the following messagebox:

TITLE: BizTalk Server Administration

Could not enlist Send Port ‘SendPortName’. The text associated with this error code could not be found.

Invalid xml declaration.
(Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM)

Root Cause

The send port has a filter tag which has encoded xml as content. this content is very sensitive to whitespace changes. This can happen if a code editor reformats the xml. I am using BizTalk 2016 but the error exists basically in all BizTalk versions as far as I know.

The broken code looks like:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

<Filter>
  &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?&gt;
  &lt;Filter xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"&gt;
  &lt;Group&gt;
  &lt;Statement Property="BTS.ReceivePortName" Operator="0" Value="ZES.SendToInhouse.DB_OutgoingTransfileToIsu" /&gt;
  &lt;Statement Property="ZES.InhouseSchemasMaps.InhouseSystem" Operator="0" Value="INHOUSESYSTEM_ISU_DSO" /&gt;
  &lt;/Group&gt;
  &lt;/Filter&gt;
</Filter>

The working code would be:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

<Filter>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?&gt;
  &lt;Filter xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"&gt;
  &lt;Group&gt;
  &lt;Statement Property="BTS.ReceivePortName" Operator="0" Value="ZES.SendToInhouse.DB_OutgoingTransfileToIsu" /&gt;
  &lt;Statement Property="ZES.InhouseSchemasMaps.InhouseSystem" Operator="0" Value="INHOUSESYSTEM_ISU_DSO" /&gt;
  &lt;/Group&gt;
  &lt;/Filter&gt;</Filter>

Solution

If you have proper source control running for you, then just rollback the last changes in your bindings file. I was too lazy and made two regex replacements:

• replace <Filter>\s+ with <Filter>
• replace \s+</Filter> with </Filter>

After this, I had to do a full build and redeploy, but the error was gone.