The other day I revisited the configuration screen for one of our production environments. When I selected BizTalk Runtime I was greated by the message “Error loading data. Please click on the icon to view details.”.
Clicking the icon didn’t do anything. Now I could imagine a couple of different things that could cause this to happen. Lost database connectivity or database corruption and security issues were my two first guesses. However in this case I knew the server was working and I knew that the user with which I was running the configuration had the required authorization, but just in case I confirmed it. I pondered this a moment and did a quick search. I only came up with two links, none of which really seemed to fit (see bottom of post for references). So I thought I’d blog about the way I “solved it”.
Lets take a step back. What should the screen show? It should show how you configured the default host instances (BizTalkServerApplication and BizTalkServerIsolatedHost). Now in our production environment we no longer have BizTalkServerApplication, instead for this server and customer it looked like this:
We had deleted the BizTalkServerApplication host instance and replaced it by host instances better suited for this environment. This causes problems for the configuration tools as it looks for that host instance (NT Service) when displaying that screen. So I added it back.
Now when we try to open the BizTalk Runtime section of the BizTalk Server 2006 Configuration, everything works.
A short note though: The screen is in this case more or less pointless, since it shows a configuration that we aren’t using, thus it can no longer be used to represent a BizTalk server configuration, nor can the export configuration option be used to fully backup a servers configuration.
While writing this post I removed the name of some servers, accounts and groups from the screenshots above. Just to be clear.
References I found that seems to deal with something of the same problem:
http://misopiniones.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2737DC89A4AAB26B!745.entry (this one I used BabelFish to translate since I don’t know spanish)
Be Logical - Notes from Johan Hedberg 